‘Mental health recovery is a journey of healing and transformation enabling a person with a mental health problem to live a meaningful life in a community of his or her choice while striving to achieve his or her potential”.

Recovery is an individual journey that follows different paths and leads to different locations.  Recovery is a process that we enter into and is a life long attitude.  Recovery is unique to each individual and can truly only be defined by the individual themselves.  What might be recovery for one person may be only part of the process for another.  Recovery may also be defined as wellness.  Mental health supports and services help people with mental illness in their recovery journeys.  The person-centered planning process is used to identify the supports needed for individual recovery.

In recovery there may be relapses.  A relapse is not a failure, rather a challenge.  If a relapse is prepared for, and the tools and skills that have been learned throughout the recovery journey are used, a person can overcome and come out a stronger individual.  It takes time, and that is why Recovery is a process that will lead to a future that holds days of pleasure and energy to persevere through the trials of life.

Resiliency and development are the guiding principles for children with serious emotional disturbance.  Resiliency is the ability to “bounce back” and is a characteristic important to nurture in children with serious emotional disturbance and their families.  It refers to the individual’s ability to become successful despite challenges they may face throughout their life.

Hope, Support, Education, Self-advocacy, Personal Responsibility

The Role of Advance Directives is one way of practicing Recovery
.By completing an Advance Directive, a person: · 

• acknowledges that recovery has its ups and downs. Recovery is not a straight course.
• creates hope by thinking, concretely, about the people in his or her life that are supportive.
• creates respect for his or herself as they are deserving of the best of care. 
• takes control and exercises choice in determining his or her mental health care.
• realizes there are different components to wellness—a holistic approach to mental wellness.
• receives and gives support from his or her peers.· is empowered by participating in all decisions regarding mental health care.

Learn More

visit us on the web:   www.co.muskegon.mi.us/cmh

                       and:    www.miottawa.org/cmh