The rehabilitative model

The rehabilitative model

The rehabilitative model
The rehabilitative model holds that, although the illness is incurable, with rehabilitation efforts the person can return to a semblance of the life they had before the illness (Anthony and Liberman, 1992). This model, based on the disability model (e.g. Bachrach, 1992), implicitly assumes serious mental illness to be incurable, in much the same way as a permanent spinal injury.

The rehabilitation model focuses on functional disability, and presupposes that the person will always be disabled, but can learn to live well within the limitations of this disability (Ahern and Fisher, 2001). Psychiatric rehabilitation has traditionally focused on behaviour management through such interventions as symptom management, development of functional skills and case management, (e.g. Anthony, Cohen and Farkas, 1990; Schade, Corrigan and Liberman, 1990; Bachrach, 1992; Liberman, 1992). See Barton (1998) for a review. Hence, it has its foundations in the medicalmodel; the focus on behaviour management reinforces the notion of chronicity, and the person may come to identify with the illness.
However, ‘Recovery is more than regaining external roles and functional skills, although these are certainly important; it is also about restoring the self. The consumer movement reaffirms the individual’s intentionality . . .’ (Barton, 1998, p. 172). According to the disabilitymodel of recovery, a person is never considered ‘recovered’, but having learned to live successfully with the illness is considered to be ‘in recovery’, requiring constant maintenance to avoid a relapse (Schiff, 2004).