Found this a couple of weeks a go and showed it to folks in a final session of a WRAP group. they loved it…

Pat Deegan – recovery is like spring…..

“Recovery is characterized by a much slower process: it is more evolution than revolution.

Gradual, it unfolds imperceptably, like spring. It doesn’t happen magically like a bolt of lightning.

Recovery requires a lot of effort and takes time but we need something around which to organise a recovery.

And I think that mental health systems are good at often taking away the very thing around which we might organize a recovery.

So it’s not uncommon for a woman to have her children taken away or for a father to have the children taken away by the state, or for a person not to return to work.

And when that happens there’s a void that opens up and there’s a sort of nothingness and as one is acclimated and sucked into the sick role …

“what’s my job? Oh, to be sick!

And to talk a lot to other people who are sick, about being sick”

 And that really is just not a fulfilling role:  just being “sick”.

And so the job becomes, or part of the effort becomes finding a new sense of meaning and purpose..

I think instinctively, in the beginning, we just want to return to who we were…

Often what we call a break down is more of a breaking through into something new.

“The coming of spring means to learn patience and it means to wait upon the fullness of time: the greening happens but we can’t make it happen. It is a phenomenon that exists in a realm beyond our will.

“I think that there’s a mystery at the heart of it: something that we can’t know directly but are privileged to participate in.

And I believe that recovery is like a greening – you can’t will it but you can wait upon it.

You might notice signs that recovery is coming but you see it only after it has happened.

Indeed there is a mystery at the heart of recovery  and it’s a very old mystery that is also always breathtakingly brand new, just like a spring.”

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