What does recovery mean?
What does recovery mean in terms of mental health? And what does it mean to be recovered from a mental illness? Are there still meds involved? Are you free and clear? Will it last forever? Throughout my time in mental health advocacy, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about recovery, and, while I do feel like the way the term “full recovery” is used is sometimes misleading, what I’ve learned is that recovery is very personal in both the process and the meaning.
I hadn’t really thought about it before
When I attended training at the Chicago chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness to be a Crisis Intervention Training panelist, we were told that, as a part of our story, we needed to define what recovery meant to us. As I listened to the other panelists’ thoughts, I realized that I hadn’t really ever defined it for myself. I’ve never been hospitalized or taken leave, but I take medication and I expect to take it for the rest of my life. I’m considered by doctors to be extremely high functioning, but I was considered high functioning even when I was experiencing symptoms far more severely than I do now. I haven’t had a schizoaffective episode in years, but I still experience symptoms occasionally – mostly minor disorganized and cognitive symptoms, but sometimes I hear or see things if I’m really stressed out.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that, over the 11 years that I’ve had the schizoaffective diagnosis, the way it presented had improved, but mostly it evolved. I’m at a point in life, with enough treatment under my belt that I feel comfortable with the idea that I will live with this for the rest of my life in one way or another. So what does that mean in terms of my recovery status?
A full recovery?
At first, when I saw people use the term “full recovery” I felt bad about myself for not reaching that level, but then I realized it’s all in how you define it. To me, a “full recovery” would mean being symptom-free and treatment-free, and that’s just not something that’s easily achievable, if it’s achievable at all for an illness like mine. Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are brain diseases that cause physical changes in the brain. At this point in time, there is no way to reverse those changes, meaning my version of a full recovery is not possible for me right now. So what does recovery mean for someone who can’t fully heal?
My journey
To me, recovery is a process. I don’t think I’m failing because I haven’t reached a stage where I’m symptom-free without medication, but, with the way pharmacology, psychiatry, and neurologoy are progressing, I’m not going to firmly say that that will never be possible. My personal recovery journey consists of me learning to adapt to the changes in my schizoaffective disorder. It took a year to truly stabilize me in both symptoms and frame of mind, and then I learned how to conquer episodes. From there I learned to recognize when symptoms arose due to stress, and, most recently, I’ve learned how to manage depression and psychotic symptoms occasionally triggered by my somewhat recently acquired post traumatic stress disorder.
It’s personal
There’s no winning and there’s no failing – everyone’s recovery story is entirely unique and completely their own; you can’t compare them. So just because I don’t define my recovery as “full” doesn’t mean I’m not doing as well as someone who does. It’s just a different perspective. My recovery has been like rafting down a river – constant, but with rapids along the way. For someone who went from being lower or non-functional to being highly functional, I can absolutely see how they could consider that a full recovery. So now that you know a little bit about my recovery story for one of my illnesses, tell me about yours. What does recovery mean to you? Just remember, there is no right or wrong answer.
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