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The belief that people can recover from serious mental illness is a major shift for mental health professionals, as demonstrated in an article in the "APA Monitor."

Early last year, when Ronald F. Levant, Ed.D., sought out colleagues to support an APA mini-convention on serious mental illness, he told a group of fellow psychologists how recovery from a major disorder such as schizophrenia was not only possible, it was happening regularly. "Recovery from schizophrenia?" a colleague snorted. "Have you lost your mind, too?"

Numerous studies have demonstrated that people can and do recover, though it is not possible to predict when recovery will occur. As many as sixty percent are eventually able to have homes, jobs, families, social lives, with few or no symptoms. This has profound implications for the role and responsibilities of service providers. It is not enough to simply contain people and control their behavior with medication. The effect of such actions, and the alternatives are well described in a speech by psychiatric survivor and mental health professional Patricia Deegan, Ph.D.

"…. entire programs, service delivery systems and treatment models can get caught up in this despair and anguish as well. These systems begin to behave just like the person with a psychiatric disability who has given up hope…

Is there another alternative? Must we respond to the anguish and apathy of people with psychiatric disability with our own anguish and apathy? I think there is an alternative. The alternative to despair is hope. The alternative to apathy is care. Creating hope-filled, care-filled environments that nurture and invite growth and recovery is the alternative.

So it is not our job to pass judgment on who will and will not recover from mental illness and the spirit breaking effects of poverty, stigma, dehumanization, degradation and learned helplessness. Rather, our job is to participate in a conspiracy of hope.

It is our job to form a community of hope that surrounds people with psychiatric disabilities. It is our job to create rehabilitation environments that are charged with opportunities for self-improvement. It is our job to nurture our staff in their special vocations of hope. It is our job to ask people with psychiatric disabilities what it is they want and need in order to grow and then to provide them with good soil in which a new life can secure its roots and grow. And then, finally, it is our job to wait patiently, to sit with, to watch with wonder, and to witness with reverence the unfolding of another person's life."

A diagnosis is not a destiny