An Integrated Model of Recovery-Oriented Behavioral
Health Care
Over the last two years, the City of Philadelphia has been taking increasing
advantage of unprecedented opportunities for reforming behavioral health
policy and practice to improve the lives of its citizens facing the challenges
of addictions and serious mental illnesses, their loved ones, and their
communities. These opportunities have been created by the joining of several
distinct, yet related, streams that have been winding separately toward
a common destination over several years to decades. Within mental health the notion and expectation of "recovery" has been around at least since the community support movement of the 1970's, if not before. This vision has come fully of age with the 1999 Report on Mental Health of the U.S. Surgeon General and the 2003 President's New Freedom Commission Report on Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America; both of which identify the need to transform mental health services to reorient them toward promoting recovery.
At the same time, a new recovery advocacy movement has been taking shape in the addiction field. This movement has the two-fold aim of removing barriers to recovery and improved quality of life for people suffering from alcohol and other drug problems. As in mental health, this movement has been led by people in recovery who envision far-reaching changes in the ways services are developed and delivered. The goal is to shift from a professionally driven model focused primarily on stabilization to a disease- and recovery-management model in which professional treatment is one aspect among many that supports people in managing their own conditions over time and in building their own resources for recovery.
Simultaneous with both of these developments has been the accumulation of consistent and convincing data which shows that mental illnesses and addictions just as often co-occur in the same person as exist independently. These findings call into question the current division of the field into two distinct and heavily bounded territories and the often adversarial relationship between these "systems".
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