How Can We Foster the Right to Healing? A Literary Contest to Gather and Publicize “Recovery Stories”

Abstract:

In the latest years, the prejudice of incurability—which drives habits and choices of many professionals and other relevant stakeholders—has been brought into crisis. The “objective evidence” emerging from the results of many long-term outcome studies found full confirmation in the “subjective truth” that derives from recovery stories. Recovery stories played a crucial role for both authors, promoting a change in their understanding of the meanings of the experience they shared as well as in their following professional and personal choices. The comprehensibility of the psychotic experience is a crucial premise for both the reading and drafting of autobiographical accounts. Many survivors of the psychotic experience define recovery as the capacity of taking back the reins of their existence in their own hands, and most of the personal accounts show this specific path to empowerment. As stated in this article, “Writing about one’s past mental disorders, about the path of recovery, is definitely not an economically-rewarding activity, but it leads you to regain full ownership of yourself, to reach a full awareness of yourself and your story, as well as providing inspirational material for professionals, laics, and other users.” The Literary Contest “Storie di Guarigione” as well as this article represent only two of the multiple initiatives aimed at increasing the quantity and quality of written accounts. Promoting these accounts should be considered both a “good practice” for professionals and a “form of solidarity” for survivors.

Keywords:

• schizophrenia
• recovery
• personal accounts
• hope

Notes

Fifteen years ago, before their current relationship-—as peers, which led them to co-author this article, as well as to share other initiatives—they were actors in a relationship of a rather different kind: that between a psychiatrist (G.T.) and an “acutely sick” patient (L.G.). The former kind of relationship has been a rather rough one at the beginning—there had been chasings, forced commitments, the not-so-consensual relocation into a half-way house, depot drugs—until a long psychotherapy began, with the gradual coming-off from antipsychotic drugs. The latter is a much more pacific relationship.