ABSTRACT
The millennial change of heart At the end of the twentieth century something very significant appeared to be happening in mental health care. Almost since its earliest beginnings, psychiatry had focused nearly exclusively on containing, or trying to ‘treat’, mental illness. This mainly involved doing things to patients, or doing things for them, to reduce disturbance. The last 20 years of the twentieth century saw a major change of professional heart – with a shift towards working with people,1 trying to develop more personally meaningful ways of living.2 The traditional assumption that mental health professionals could ‘fix’ mental illness was on the wane and increasingly had been overtaken by the view that people should participate in, if not actually lead, their own ‘recovery’.3,4 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of ‘recovery’ had become, almost, accepted part of mental health policy in most Western countries. Since 2000, reviews of mental health legislation in New Zealand,5 England,6 Scotland7 and Ireland8 have all given emphasis to the concept of ‘recovery’. In mental health nursing, major reviews in England9
and Scotland7 have proposed that nurses should waste no time in adopting a ‘recovery focus’, as part of the modernization of the discipline. The adoption of ‘recovery values’ represented a significant aspect of this change of
‘focus’. It was clear that some kind of philosophical shift was taking place but, for many, the exact nature of these ‘recovery values’ was unclear.
