Management

The Reality of Recovery in Personality Disorder

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This book tells of a journey taken by a group of service users who had attracted a diagnosis of personality disorder, a journey that spans 20 years. It is an account that aspires to show the inner world of personality disorder from the perspective of service users. It aims to examine the process of recovery for those with this diagnosis and it suggests evidence-based ways forward for support and treatment. It is both a cautionary tale and a story of hope ome lives appear to have fault lines running through them, fatal flaws. It was in the early 1990s, in North East Essex in England that I first stepped into a psychiatric ward. I saw a young woman with cuts covering her arms. I wondered who could have done such a thing to her, not realizing that they were self-inflicted. I did not know how or why such acts should come to be. I did not understand why human beings, who held a life in common with me, should be driven to such acts. Here was the beginning of my particular part of this journey.
At that time, as a mental health advocate working for Mind organizations in North East Essex, and based at the local psychiatric acute inpatient hospital, the advocacy office was a frequent port of call for service users with a diagnosis of personality disorder. The themes they brought were consistent: discharge from hospital immanent even though still suicidal; being sectioned into hospital under the Mental Health Act and subject to close observation; being transferred to a secure hospital; at risk of losing children via child protection procedures; ending in prison; and a whole gamut of desperate outcomes, all contributing to a compounding of symptoms and feelings of being fundamentally and irrevocably misunderstood. One man wandered aimlessly into the Mind office saying that the psychiatrist had told him there was nothing that could be done for him because he had personality disorder. Later that year he was dead. A woman in the local psychiatric hospital ward, who was self-starving to a dangerous degree, was told in exasperated terms that she simply needed to start eating. These were not isolated examples and I became consumed with questions about this diagnosis. As an advocate I became the listener...to stories about lives where there seemed no mercy, where the world appeared treacherous and full of chaos and without reason and where the effects of time, visible and invisible, had dissolved hope. At that time I was involved in a kind of mental health advocacy that I believe has gone out of fashion. This was advocacy used to articulate the views of people generally not heard. It was advocacy inspired by such activists as Larry Gostin, the American lawyer who was the first legal director of National Mind, and whose book A Human Condition (1975) was largely responsible for reforms embraced in the UK 1983 Mental Health Act. I questioned whether, as an advocate, I could be the purveyor of stories of suffering and injustice that might lead to understanding and change.

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Detail Information

Series Title

The Reality of Recovery in Personality Disorder

Call Number

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Publisher

United Kingdom : Jessica Kingsley Publishers., 2016

Collation

1-338

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978 1 78450 071 9

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

PSYCHOLOGY

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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