NAMI: Recovery from Mental Illness:
Recovery is a process, beginning with diagnosis and eventually moving into successful management of your illness. Successful recovery involves learning about your illness and the treatments available, empowering yourself through the support of peers and family members, and finally moving to a point where you take action to manage your own illness.
OK...Now this makes sense to me. I am not trying to "recover" in the way my mind was thinking of recovering. (-Getting over it completely.) NAMI's definition is relieving to me! "Successful management of your illness." This makes me feel better. I thought, "How can one truly ever "recover" from a mental illness?" And looks like I was on the right track. I feel so much "saner" now!
I am totally in sync with this definition. I am managing my illness successfully and have learned about treatments, and have moved to a point where I take action to manage it. Ok, good.
I hope this doesn't seem dismal to some, who I perceive to be hoping to totally rid their lives of a part of themselves. Maybe it is possible for a few out there. But for me, this is what I have been talking about. I can have a bad day here and there, everyone has that! I can feel ok with my illnesses as long as I am managing it to my best ability and taking others in my immediate circle into consideration, too.
Sorry, but it is tiring for me to constantly be reading about others processes and yearnings for what I thought was an impossible place to reach. I feel bad for these people. For people who have convinced themselves that there is this wonderful, ever happy place they might one day reach if only they could tame their minds completely. I wonder if this definition would make a difference in their lives?
I like that definition. It is actually very empowering because it is about us managing our illness and taking action. There are some things about our illnesses we can't control, but we can control how we deal with them, or manage them.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's like my high blood pressure. My doctor expects me to be on blood pressure medicine for the rest of my life. Even if I were to lose weight to where I was in my 20s, I would probably still have high blood pressure. One time I was talking to him about someday getting off the medicine--that was my goal. He said rather than focus on that, focus on living a healthy lifestyle. That would help me regardless of whether or not I still had to take a blood pressure pill.
I agree it is empowering!
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