Recovery in the Bin

We are a User Led group for MH Survivors and Supporters who are fed up with the way co-opted ‘recovery’ is being used to discipline and control those who are trying to find a place in the world, to live as they wish, trying to deal with the very real mental distress they encounter on a daily basis. We believe in human rights and social justice!

We want a robust ‘Social Model of Madness, Distress & Confusion’, placing mental health within the context of social justice and the wider class struggle.

We consider ‘Unrecovered’ is as valid and legitimate as “Recovered”, and we accept and respect the political and social difference. So some of us have accepted a new word / signifier ‘Unrecovered’. However, this doesn’t mean we want to stay ‘unwell’ or ‘ill’ (whatever that means), but that we reject this new neoliberal intrusion on the word ‘recovery’ that has been redefined, and taken over by marketisation, language, techniques and outcomes.

We recognise that the growing development of MH ‘Recovery’ in UK/US, during the past decade or so has been corrupted by neoliberalism and capitalism is the crisis! Some of us will never feel “Recovered” living under these intolerable and inhumane social pressures.

We believe that there are core principles of ‘recovery’ that are worth saving, and that the colonisation of ‘recovery’ undermines those principles, which have hitherto championed autonomy and self-determination. These principles cannot be found in a one size fits all technique, or calibrated by an outcome measure.

We ask that mental health services should never put anyone under any pressure to ‘recover’, by over emphasising or even imposing ‘Recovery Stars’ or WRAP’s (Wellness Recovery Action Plan). We stand opposed to mental health services using ‘recovery’ ideology as a means of masking greater coercion. We believe that this rise is a symptom of neoliberalism and that a meaningful ‘recovery’ is impossible for many of us because of the intolerable social and economic conditions, such as poor housing, poverty, stigma, racism, sexism, unreasonable work expectations, and countless other barriers. The underfunding and under resourcing of mental health services means that service users are under pressure to conform to a narrow idea of recovery. The changes to the social security system promote the ideal of work being good for everyone’s health while undermining any real hope of a good life, which is what recovery is supposed to be about.

Recovery In The Bin’s Key Principles can be found here.

#Unrecovered

February 2016

RITB is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License

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