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Recovery: the true meaning of recovery
- Author:
- O'HAGAN Mary
- Journal article citation:
- Mental Health Today, December 2008, pp.16-17.
- Publisher:
- Pavilion
- Place of publication:
- Hove
The author voices her support for the recovery approach in mental health care, drawing on her knowledge of the mental health systems in New Zealand and England. She draws attention to two different versions of the recovery model - one from the service user movement and one from the psychiatric rehabilitation. She calls for mental health professionals to tackle their misplaced institutional beliefs.
Leadership for empowerment and equality: a proposed model for mental health user/survivor leadership
- Author:
- O'HAGAN Mary
- Journal article citation:
- International Journal of Leadership in Public Services, 5(4), December 2009, pp.34-43.
- Publisher:
- Emerald
The article, for the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership, which works to improve mental health services by supporting innovative leadership, is written by an author who experienced severe mental health problems and used mental health services as a young woman, went on to establish in the 1990’s a user/survivor movement protesting at the system’s failures to help (or actually harming) users and focussing on empowerment and equality, was a mental health commissioner and is now an international consultant in mental health problems and services. Leadership, among people with lived experiences of mental health problems (survivors) could be better developed to help themselves and others currently experiencing mental health problems, at service and systemic levels. Critiques of conventional models of leadership, in terms of leaders being inherently good, denial of darker forces of greed and power at play, assumption of heroic responsibility all problems, lack of ability to change or critique themselves, and considering transactional and transformational approaches, may provide a framework upon which survivors can build a leadership model. The new roles, practices and competencies of user/survivor leaders will be dependent on philosophical, psychological, political and practical (physical) shifts in current mental health service systems for their acceptance.