CCChat-Magazine_Issue-15

Recovery
College
Recovery College provides courses to help people build an
understanding of themselves. It is where the lived experience
and the learned experience join forces.
There are a number of Recovery
Colleges running across the country.
They offer educational courses about
mental health and recovery which are
designed to increase knowledge and
skills for self management of a
student's own mental health and
wellbeing. For a person with a lived
experience of mental ill health, it can
help them to become an expert in their
own wellbeing and recovery.
Recovery colleges can be used as an
alternative to, or alongside mental
health services, or to help move out of
mainstream services and they are a
place of education where service users,
carers and staff learn together.
This differs from the traditional
therapeutic approach where a client/
patient talks to a therapist, in a
recovery college both those with lived
experience of mental illness and those
who work as professionals learn from
each other.
Another difference between traditional
ideas of clinical recovery and what a
recovery college is able to offer is that
traditional recovery focuses on
removing symptoms and 'getting back
to normal', whereas personal recovery
means different things to different
people and is defined by the person
who is experiencing the mental illness.
Putting recovery into action means
focusing care on what is personally
meaningful and important and
recovery colleges provide a range of
courses and workshops open to service
users, carers and members of staff to
develop their skills, understand mental
health, identify goals and support their
access to opportunities to learn, grow
and plan for the future.
The courses are co-developed and codelivered
by people with lived
experience and learned experience of
mental health challenges.
Making The Invisible Visible