Solution Focused Recovery Conference

In this groundbreaking conference, practitioners, academics and policy-makers will celebrate the coming together of good ideas and good practice. For 20 years mental health practitioners in the community and in hospitals have been learning about and putting into everyday practice a solution focused approach to their work.

 

Solution focused practice requires that outcome is given priority over diagnosis and that the primary agenda for all work comes from the client, the person whom the service is meant to serve.

 

The Recovery Model has been a parallel development steered mainly by academics and policy-makers in consultation with service user groups. This too requires that the client’s agenda comes formost and that finding pathways to fulfilment is more important than constructing diagnoses.

 

These obvious partners will be brought together for the first time at a national conference. The day will mark an important stage in two of the most creative developments in recent years.

 

 

Geoff Shepherd is a senior policy advisor at the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health and visiting professor at the Institute of Psychiatry. He has been a key figure in the development of the Recovery Model in Britain and co-author of Making Recovery a Reality (available free on line).

 

Geoff is currently working with the Department of Health, the National Mental Health Development Unit and a number of service providers on the organisational and implementation requirements for putting recovery first. This is ground-breaking work which, it is hoped, will significantly influence the future of mental health provision in the UK

 

 

The medical model, concerned as it is with diagnoses, illness and cure seems at odds with the more aspirational user-led ‘get on with life’ philosophy of the Recovery Model. Debbie Mountain, Consultant Psychiatrist Scotland’s lead psychiatrist on Recovery, will present some of the concerns that psychiatrists have about recovery, not as an obstacle, but as a way towards developing a deeper understanding of how to practice recovery in some challenging circumstances. She will argue that the two approaches will need to find a way to ‘live together’ if the value of either is to be maximised