The first meeting to develop a Whole Person Whole Life Recovery Community Programme including a Recovery House took place over two days at the San Giovanni Campus on the 7th and 8th March 2015. Over 60 Clients, family members, Trieste Mental Health Service staff and workers from cooperatives attended. The meeting was facilitated by John Jenkins, Roberta Casadio and Paul Baker. The meeting was a great success and the new programme and recovery house will start on the 4th of May 2005.
The Whole Life Recovery Community offers opportunities for individual service users, their family members and co-workers commit to work together in new way to examine their life stories and the importance to their recovery journey.
Individual service users who wish to participate will have experienced a first episode of psychosis. They will already receive support and treatment from the Trieste Mental Health Services. Many of them will hear voices and experience other unusual states. It is fundamentally important that family members are fully involved in the programme from the beginning.
For people to embark on a recovery journey, time and space is essential, the Recovery House is a place where this can be achieved and where people will be assisted to develop and pursue their recovery journey. It will be important to demonstrate this programme improves the mental health wellbeing and resilience of this group of people. We believe it could then be replicated for other groups of service users in Trieste and beyond.
The Recovery House location is near the San Giovanni Campus. It can provide accommodation for six to eight people. It has a pleasant garden with scope for producing vegetables and space for reflection and exercise.
The Recovery House is being established by:
Identifying a group of service users, workers and family members who are committed to the programme
Providing and facilitating training for the group in the whole person whole life recovery approach for the group together with the relevant community services that will play a part in this programme
Preparing the group to take part in the recovery programme in the house
Providing essential on going support and mentoring to all the participants in the programme
Ensuring that people continue to be supported in their recovery journey after they have left the house
Establishing a methodology for the evaluation of the programmes
The programme that people will address in the house to support individual recovery will include:
Supporting reflections on individual recovery including determining peoples dreams, goals and pathways
Working alongside families
Building resilience in the face of personal and emotional difficulties
Working with voices and other unusual states
Developing and cementing autonomy from services
Extending friendship and peer support networks
Engaging in meaningful activities and work
Other agendas identified by individuals
People who stay are expected to develop a recovery plan and work on that during their stay, the length of a persons stays is flexible.
Identifying and developing a recovery action plan through maintaining a journal, (the team members also keep a journal). Then over the course of the three months undertaking voices work, PATH Planning, recording a Personal Video Statement, writing a Recovery Action plan. Also developing local circles support within their own communities.
Partner Organisations in the Programme Trieste Mental Health Services Family Association Social Cooperative IMHCN
