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Mental health service users' aspirations for recovery: examining the gaps between what policy promises and practice delivers
- Authors:
- DAVIES Kate, GRAY Mel
- Journal article citation:
- British Journal of Social Work, 45(S1), 2015, pp.i45-i61.
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This paper draws on findings from an Australian study of mental health service users' perspectives on service user participation to examine the challenges for translating recovery policy into practice. It considers the ways in which national mental health policies and developing welfare reforms reflect and/or contradict the highly personal mode of recovery important to service users; though they seemingly signal potential wins for service user empowerment, they are accompanied by losses for those who do not fit neatly into clinical categorisations. The service users (n = 11) and service providers (n = 6) interviewed for this exploratory qualitative study revealed that recovery was a lifelong process of fluctuating capacity and described a system poorly equipped and often unwilling to move beyond tokenistic modes of participation. The analysis of service user perspectives against the backdrop of policy reform reveals the ongoing tensions between personal and clinical definitions of recovery. (Publisher abstract)