Practice Standards for Recovery-Oriented Care

What does a recovery-oriented system of care look like in practice? As we suggested in the preceding chapters, the primary aim of recovery-oriented care is to offer people with serious mental illness a range of effective and culturally responsive interventions from which they may choose those services and supports they find useful in promoting or protecting their own recovery. In addition to diagnosing and reducing symptoms and deficits, a recovery-oriented system of care also identifies and builds on each individual’s assets and areas of health and competence to support that person in achieving a sense of mastery over his or her condition while regaining a meaningful, constructive sense of membership in the broader community (Davidson et al., 2007). While the goal of recovery-oriented care may appear, in this way, to be relatively clear and straightforward, the ways in which care can be used to promote recovery are neither so clear nor so straightforward—neither, unfortunately, are the ways in which care, as currently configured, may impede or undermine recovery. The following practice standards are offered as a beginning roadmap of this territory, bringing together what we think we know at this point about how care can best promote and sustain recovery, and how care may need to be transformed to no longer impede it. These standards are drawn from over two years of conversations with practitioners, people in recovery, families, and program managers and are informed by the current professional literature on recovery and recovery-oriented practice. These standards focus primarily on the concrete work of practitioners and provider agencies so as to provide practical and useful direction to individuals and collectives that are committed to implementing recovery-oriented care. We recognize, however, that many of the practices described will require a broader commitment of agency leadership to significant and ongoing administrative restructuring. In the future, we also anticipate that systems will want to add domains to the ones we propose here, in such areas as prevention, early intervention, cultural competence, and the assessment and monitoring of outcomes.