A Look At Mental Health Recovery
When faced with chronic problems like diabetes or a bad heart, you just gear up to learn to live with it. You educate yourself on what is to be done when the problem flares up. Similarly, in the case of recovery from mental illnesses, the cure is an ongoing process. It will be unwise to expect that after the treatment you will come out of it a completely new person without any problems. Problems would continue to crop up and sometimes you will feel bad and weak. You will however have to adjust to such developments and with each such adjustment, you will continue to make progress and begin to feel that you are leaving your mental illness behind.
Recovery, in the case of mental illnesses means to improve from a bad situation to a better one. It is an ongoing process and progress will not be steady. Sometimes, you will progress very rapidly and sometimes you will regress. You will keep learning new tricks to handle symptoms of the illness as they come up and also gain new insights. There will be errors committed and disappointments, but you will become the stronger for them.
Mental illnesses very often take years to develop and manifest. To expect a quick fix under the circumstances is being naïve. Recovery will be a lifelong affair. One goes through a long period being controlled by the illness and similarly a long period to come out of it. You may become free of the demons of the illness, but you will have recurrences of old symptoms on and off.
That is why it is important that there is early diagnosis and treatment. It is possible to successfully treat a case of say, schizophrenia during the early stages of its manifestation, than when it has become full blown. Similarly in the case of relapses too, early intervention could mean cure whereas, if allowed to progress, could mean going through the same old agonizing experience all over again. Perhaps even to the extent of completely eliminating all possibilities of total recovery.
Recovery is but one part of the total process. There is also the need to restore mental health and a sense of well being in the patient. Withdrawing from normal life due to the fear of stigma and discrimination arising out of long endured mental illnesses is counter productive. This complicates matters by generating a sense of low self-esteem, and will negate the whole purpose of cure and recovery.
Unfortunately, returning to one’s earlier life is far more difficult than the entire process of cure. Returning to what was “ perhaps possible” takes a great deal of time. It also takes a long time to erase the damage already caused due to inadequate facilities being available for those who have suffered mental illnesses.
This however need not be true for you. You can look forward to either going back to doing what you were doing earlier, or go in a totally different direction but as rewarding. Other people with mental illnesses have done so, and there is no reason why you too cannot do it.
