Summary: Therapeutic Consumer-Oriented Recovery

Introduction Providing mental health services is facing multiple challenges for the service provider. One important challenge is the provision of efficient mental healthcare services, which is highly dependent upon a preferred method of choice, which the provider believes capable of satisfying the most, if not all, of the service users’ often-diverse needs (Winship, 2016). Compounding this challenge is the still-unsettled universal definition of the term ‘recovery’ (Winship, 2016; Leamy, et al., 2011), which means essentially different to different mental healthcare providers and healthcare service consumers. Nevertheless, despite differences in expressions, these definitions agreed that recovery is a process, be it seen as a ‘journey’ or

Winship (2016) himself had sub-categorized the non-traditional recovery systems into ‘tough’ recovery systems, which comprises all the Therapeutic Community-based systems that utilizes the Reality Confrontation approach, and the ‘tender’ recovery systems, which emphasized an asset-based approach (i.e. utilizing the resources available to the person for his

(2010), who noticed the definitive shift the service frameworks of mental healthcare, nonetheless, clearly noticed the shift from a rehabilitative (i.e. traditional-medical) service frame towards the ‘recovery-oriented’ framework. This perspective provides a definite demarcation between the concept of traditional rehabilitative resolution of a mental illness and the concept of recovery from a mental illness, which is conceptually significant. In effect, unlike Winship (2016) and Bellack (2006), Caldwell et al. (2010) removed the traditional model from inclusion into the broad conceptualization of recovery, distinguishing it clearly as ‘not rehabilitation’. McKay et al (2012) agreed on the necessity of this separation from traditional concept of mental illness in psychiatry as the recovery model envisioned a change in the power balance between the consumer (traditionally referred to as ‘patient’) and the clinician (currently referred as ‘service provider’). The concepts embodying the recovery model opposed the negative and narrow images of psychiatry as “domineering, depersonalizing, institutional, or purely ‘medical’” (McKay, et al., 2012).

Meanwhile, McKay et al. (2012) attempted to differentiate recovery from person-centered care (PCC) or consumer-oriented care (COC), attributing an empowerment focus in recovery while insisting on an individual focus for PCC. However, a comprehensive understanding of both inevitably leads to the conclusion that recovery is essentially