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| The empowerment model |
The empowerment model of recovery, as characterized by the National Empowerment Center in the United States, holds that mental illness does not have a physiological foundation. In a speech delivered to the World Mental Health Day Conference, Chamberlin (1996) stated, ‘Despite all the research and all the theorizing, the schizophrenia gene or the schizophrenia germ has never been demonstrated.
I believe that it never will; we can no more find the ‘cause’ of complex human behavior in brain chemistry than we can find the ‘cause’ of poetry’. Rather, mental illness is regarded as a sign of severe emotional distress in the face of overwhelming stressors (Ahern and Fisher, 2001; Fisher, 2003). This can interrupt normal development. How a person responds, and is responded to, plays a crucial role in their further development: ‘With an attitude of optimism, understanding, trust and empowerment, people not only can restore their emotional balance, but also can heal past traumas. They are able to retain their expected role and avoid being labelled mentally ill’ (Ahern and Fisher, 2001, p. 26). Advocates of the empowerment model are not satisfied with the notion of continued mental illness in recovery, and the strong version of this model denies the need for medical treatment (Fisher, 2003; McLean, 1995; Siebert, 2000). The Tidal Model of mental health nursing also eschews the medical model of mental illness, and encourages instead, the adoption of the construct ‘problems of living’ (Barker, 2001, 2003). According to this model, the most common form of disempowerment in mental illness is the failure to give a proper hearing to the person’s story of his or her experience (Barker, 2003).
Which, if any, of these models best reflects the position of consumers who speak of their own recovery? To develop an understanding of what consumers mean by recovery, we examined first-person accounts of recovery, qualitative studies that addressed this issue and consumer-authored theoretical articles for definitions or descriptions of recovery. From this review, we developed a consumer-oriented conceptualization of recovery.
