Becoming Uniquely Human

Something occurred to me the other day. I was sitting in a staff meeting and I heard a very empowering story of another individuals mental health recovery. The story sounded like many others I had read about and heard from other survivors. First, I want to clarify, recovery is a specific practice orientation in the mental health field. When I write about my "recovery" I am touching on the practice of learning to engage in practices that allows one to live and engage in their environment in a meaningful, intentional and purposeful way. I am not expressing an definitive end-point where the manifestations of  mental health are magically removed. The notion of an "illness" being matched with a "cure" to restore one to a state of equilibrium is a notion that is deeply rooted in our medical system. Example, you have a cough, you go to your doctor, they give you a prescription and the cough is subsequently treated. In mental health recovery work, one's situation is incredibly subjective and there is no, at this time, a cure all for trick, medication or therapy, that removes symptoms. Mental health recovery is about engaging in a way of living that allows one to really live with mental illness, but in a more tolerable, comfortable and intensional way. There is no end point, one is always engaging in recovery and fine tuning their recovery plan. Some folks reach the point of not requiring medications; this does not mean that they will never need medication again- rather, at this fixed time they are engaging in other recovery strategies.

Back to the imprint of this narrative on my own recovery plan. For a number of years I think I was waiting for that "cure" to completely remove my symptoms. I had this myopic view, despite working in mental health, that a psychiatrist, therapist or a pill would one day restore me back to pre-depression/anxiety. The individual who shared their story with me expressed that their journey through recovery was inspired when they realized that "nobody else was going to do this but themselves." I realized that nobody else, including professional help and medication, was going to wave a magic wand over me and remove my symptoms. One of my favourite mental health scholars, Pat Deegan, describes the process of recovery in the most eloquent of terms- recovery is not the process of becoming normal, rather it is the process of becoming uniquely human.

I think this insight into my own recovery journey, the one I am sharing publicly, really instills and contextualizes what I hope to get out of this process. My recovery is more than completing a half-marathon, rather the journey of training for this half-marathon serves to ignite the myriad of other strategies that will assist me in becoming uniquely human.