The Reclamation of Personhood: The Core of Recovery - The Essence of Mental Health Nursing?
The concept of recovery has been embraced, internationally, by many mental health nurses as central to their work. A recent Scottish report on the future development of mental health nursing signalled the protection and promotion of "rights and recovery" as the key aims of nursing practice, through the development of meaningful "relationships".
However, the meaning of mental health 'recovery' remains unclear, with many authors and organisations arguing that recovery is personal and individual. Moreover, paradigm conflict is evident where recovery-focused care is located within a traditional psychiatric treatment focused system, where recovery has long been defined by the medical concept of 'cure'.
The concept of reclamation emerged from ongoing studies of the recovery phenomenon in countries with widely differing social and cultural backgrounds, and addresses the abstract process of regaining the sense of personal agency, lost through the experience of 'mental breakdown' or psychiatric care.
Here I shall discuss how reclamation might represent a critical part of the process of 'recovery' and might also be essential to any meaningful definition of 'nursing', as a social, if not a professional, construct.