Where Alternative Facts are Not Just for Americans

Dontcha wanna learn how to jump while wearing super colourful clothes?

 

 

Turning Binners into Winners since 2015
 

Introduction

Welcome, and congratulations on taking this brave first step towards your recovery.

Your Future Starts Here! We’ve made a college just for Mentals: prepare to be patronised! You can pretend you are going to college just like the Normals!

RC’s are really universities, with campuses, curriculums and graduation ceremonies. Thankfully you don’t have any student debt and no certificate of any value. (Try presenting your ‘Finding Happiness’ course attendance to UCAS.) You’ll meet the Mayor at your faux-graduation; we don’t mind if you wear mortar boards and take photos. Alongside your studies you will find many vocational opportunities and get invaluable, real life experience for your future zero-hours career and destitution by volunteering for us and providing unpaid peer support.

Take charge of your mental health! Challenge those self-defeating beliefs! You too can recover! (And if you don’t it is your fault and you can’t say we didn’t try to help you).

We provide the classroom, set the schedule, define the time limits – all you need to do is comply.  We have pictures with uplifting words on them like “HOPE” and “EMPOWERMENT”. Our fast-paced, shallow and fully self-contained courses have been designed to leave no need for further reading, questioning or dissent.

Our curriculum is brought to you with a total lack of evidence base – in the age of austerity we no longer need an evidence base, we just need to cut costs and get you pesky Mentals off our books. We can guarantee a 100% success rate – as long as you don’t ask to see the RCT’s. You will find many opportunities on your recovery journey to share your talents widely and publicly with Non-Mentals. This may involve art exhibitions, drama productions, or musical numbers. Unfortunately as funding is tight we can’t pay you. By knowing that you have challenged stigma and provoked discussion among regular folk you will be more than satisfied without need for monetary reward. Please don’t think of this as exploitation, you are giving back after years of receiving.  Recovery College is the alternative to actual support and SO MUCH CHEAPER. We have the technology, we can instruct you on how to recover in twelve easy sessions. No, wait – the funding has been slashed. Six. Yes, as long as you’re committed you can recover in six. Well, perhaps you don’t really want to get better.

Choose acceptance. Choose compliance. Choose someone else’s perfect life. Choose to recover. Choose it NOW.

We take pride in helping you learn that, quite frankly, you do not matter. Your life does not matter. Your experiences do not matter (unless they conform to our stereotypes and help fill our classrooms and coffers). We specialise in breaking your spirit and making you a willing slave to neoliberalism, and importantly, not bloody moan about it (or it’s off back to happiness class for you!)  We’ll blame your mental distress on you. YOU just have to DO BETTER.

Recovery is an individual journey with unique personal meaning. We will tell you which way to go and what it means, and how long you’re allowed to take.

There are so many opportunities for you at Recovery College: Become self-determining and self-reliant by joining our synchronised self-harming and sewing yourself-up group!  Mindful medication-taking – you too could learn the ancient art of accepting a depot up your bum! Straightjacket hindering your recovery? Why not join our colouring in with your mouth classes? Only biddable Mentals need apply. Mentals who think and ask questions don’t have sufficient INSIGHT for Recovery College and anyway you’d screw up our outcomes.

I will end this introduction with an inspiring quote from a DWP assessor:

“What’s that? Did you attend Recovery College?” *removes PIP*

 

Courses

Special Introductory Course in Form Filling  

Before we even get to any mindful shenanigans you will learn the art of the outcome measure so that we can demonstrate outcomes and get paid in full. You get bugger all. Though maybe it’s mindful form filling.

Access to Work

On this course you will learn to love zero hour contracts, no job security and no sick pay. You too have the RIGHT to work.

Finding Happiness

Lost your happiness? Join our happiness location course. FREE colour it yourself map on course completion’. Sign up for a happy, healthy new you. We will teach you to laugh in the face of poverty, oppression and abuse. (Prohibited topics: poverty, welfare, shit working conditions and JCP bullying, food banks, discrimination).

Learn to sing this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLaToGfEaOg *Anti-emetics will be provided*

Equality for All

Are you failing to reach your full potential? Underpaid? Unpaid? Verging on destitute despite working for us? We have just the course for you: ‘Equality For All’ (Staff only, service users excluded).

Mindfulness

Bored of your regular toolkit of hammer and screwdriver? WE CAN EQUIP YOU WITH AN EMOTIONAL TOOLKIT to keep in your mindfulness toolbox. Mindfulness is proven to help you silently, repeatedly, re-experience all that long-repressed trauma. (Bring your own raisins.)

Activation Therapy

Learn how every action (walking, breathing, shitting) can be a therapy! It’s simple: just add therapy on the end and we have walking therapy, breathing therapy and shitting therapy. (Note: this therapy is not to be performed with words such as ‘smashy’ or ‘murder’.)

DSM 5 Class

Learn all about your psychiatric diagnoses and pretend it’s not a medical model. You will also learn to stop fighting your psychiatric diagnosis and just be it (whilst pretending to be recovered because it’s medical dx with recovery wrapped around it #ReBrand).

Recovery Porn

Join us for our inspirational class ‘Writing Your Recovery Narrative’ and see your life story used fee-free in our promotional literature to help us obtain more NHS contracts. When you recover you can come back and tell your story, thus joining the recovery porn industry. One student said of this course:

“Finally, I understood I had an mental illness and some of us have a genetic predisposition and I learned that I could recover by challenging my distorted thinking patterns and being mindful and distracting myself and ignoring the obvious bullshit inherent in these explanations and by ignoring anything that happened to me in the past because that makes MH staff look all awkward and cross with me and the staff were all really supportive and I think I’m ready to get a job now and maybe become a peer supporter because I’d like to help people like me who have a mental illness that just happens because they are a bit genetically broken to learn that their recovery lies in their own hands and not to think about this too much because it’s proper science and everything. Is that ok? Did I do well?”

In this class you will also learn how to look down on and judge fellow Mentals who fail to recover.

Gratitude Class

Learn how to be thankful for all psychiatric staff, and to reward them with good behaviour. Gain joy from fulfilling what you never before knew was your true role, because to feel joy when incarcerated for six months against your will is truly the first step in your recovery. You didn’t need that job, or that husband or home, because what you found by being denied human rights is how damn thankful you are to the psychiatric system for saving you.

Modified Behavioural Modification

Learn to desensitize yourself with modified behavioural modification and psycho-mechanism-schemata, where no one is responsible for the others’ emotions, and with strict boundaries of total lack of response to anyone who is upset. Learn about your limbic system and Inner Chimp. Learn to TAKE CONTROL and completely ignore the world around you (cos it’s all about your shit).  Learn to take control and personal responsibility for those things over which you have no control and are not responsible for.

Wank Your Way out of Sexual Dysfunction

Drug-induced impotence? Develop a more resilient wrist so you can wank for longer. You will come if you have hope, and a stronger wrist.

When to Call the Crisis Team

You will learn everything you have ever needed to know about how to engage with this elusive, nay, mythical mental health service. Hint: the answer to the title of this course is ‘never’. Advanced lesson: join us for our extra short 1 minute course on ‘How the Crisis Team Can Help You’.

How to Budget Successfully whilst Destitute

This course includes the award-winning class on ‘How to Make Delicious Milkshakes from Medication-Induced Lactation’.

Patronisation for Beginners

Have your photo taken for our brochure for an Inspiration Photo. NB: Only photos of Mentals who conform to western attractiveness ideals will be printed in brochures.

Special Guest Lecture from a Famous Mental

Topic: ‘How to be Successful and Mental’. Special lecture by rich, outgoing, ex-mental person who has been to university and never set foot in a Recovery College in her life. She works hard for her money *despite* being mental.

Lying on Your CV

Learn how to explain hospitalisations, extended unemployment, psychiatric meltdowns and the odd arrest for your own safety in ways that will sound attractive to any employer.

How to Gloss over Socioeconomic Oppression as the Root Cause of your Mental Distress

Tutor: a middle class theorist/academic with no lived experience.

Other Courses Include:

How to Be a Better Jesus

Work Will Set You Free is now rebranded as: Work for Wellbeing and Be Too Exhausted to be Depressed

Nipple Tassel Dancing for Recovery

How to Be Assertive but Not Too Assertive – we would still like to control you

Sleep Hygiene for Filthy Insomniacs

 

 

 

Coproduction

Learn the art of quashing service user dissent. Get paid less as a peer trainer than professionals teaching with you being treated equally – you’re giving back and contributing, you know.  Increase your skills and confidence through helping us co produce our courses – we would particularly like to hear from service users who would like to obtain advanced skills in ‘sit down and just shut the fuck up’. ‘Peer’ co-pro means we look great plus we’ll give u a service if you’re good. In the Netherlands peers are called “folding chair clients”. When needed, take 1 from storage, fold them out, and then back into storage.

Coming Soon: Recovery College Student Loans. Be in debt like a Normal! Please note Recovery College Student Loans will eventually come into place following the phasing out of all sickness and disability benefits. You might not value your recovery if you got it for free. We’re being kind. Really. We think. With interest rates this low (19.9%APR Terms and Conditions apply) you’d be mad not to!

Outcomes (also known as hidden agenda)

The required outcomes are: not using services; bugger off somewhere else, anywhere. To be viewed as properly recovered: go to a real university or get a job (any will do).

Job Opportunities

On successful completion of your studies you will be invited to join us in a paid or unpaid role as a peer support worker, peer buddy, or co-trainer. Earn less than your professional colleagues (but it’s better than zero hrs in a supermarket).  Earn less than the professionals because you might be equal under employment law but no matter how ‘recovered’ we say you are, you are still mental and will never be worth as much to the college as us.

Remember kids: Recovery is the new black.

Recommended Reading in Preparation of your Studies:

Ruby Wax

Stephen Fry

“Recovery has always only ever been an empty word that refers to whatever agenda or ideology anyone chooses.” Robert Dellar

 

© 2017 Recovery in the Bin, All Rights Reserved