Unlike a day activity centre, a recovery college is explicitly aimed at stimulating learning processes and developing your own identity. To this end each recovery college develops its own curriculum, made up of various courses.

A curriculum of your own

The courses are about, for example, understanding your inner world, developing life skills, developing expertise by experience and strengthening your social network.

All courses are given by experts by experience. Besides the courses there are often other activities, and there is room to meet people.

Initiatives for and by people with mental health problems have existed for some time

These initiatives have existed since the rise of the client movement in the 1970s. The thinking behind them originally developed mainly outside the framework of mental health care.

Today concepts such as self-help, expertise by experience and peer support are becoming more and more part of regular care. This has to do with the growing awareness within mental health care that expertise by experience and empowerment are essential ingredients in working on social and personal recovery.

An example: Enik Recovery College in the Netherlands

One of the first and best-known recovery colleges in the Netherlands is Enik, in the Utrecht region. The central idea of Enik is to create a free space where participants can work together, through peer support and self-help, on personal development and recovery.

At Enik different activities come together:

• A training programme
• A social meeting point
• A retreat facility

The retreat is a 5-day full-time training together with other participants, including meals and overnight stays. The aim is to break through daily patterns. Enik works with a 100% peer ideology: all activities are developed by and for people with experience of psychiatry.

Working with your experiences

Working with an expert by experience

An expert by experience has learned in training to use their own experience of mental health problems as support for someone else. An expert by experience has also learned to facilitate groups.

The recovery work group is self-help in a group

Such a group is often facilitated by an expert by experience: someone who has also had a psychosis (or other mental health complaints) and has recovered from it. Read more about the recovery work group.

You learn from each other. In a recovery work group you exchange experiences and learn from each other. Not only about what went wrong, but also about new solutions. You support each other, you often make new friends, and above all you discover that you are not the only one.

Taking your life back into your own hands, step by step. In a good recovery group the members encourage each other to take their lives back into their own hands step by step. Others who have been in the same situation often see much better what you are afraid of, and what you are good at.

Getting to know recovery

In short, you get to know recovery. You exchange experiences around themes, and a recovery theme is often explored in depth. Themes such as:

• What is recovery?
• What are sources of support for you?
• How do you deal with prejudice around you?
• When do you tell people about your mental health history, and when not?
• What do you do if you are dissatisfied with your medication or your psychotherapy?
• Which education or work are you going to do? How will you get there?
• How do you deal with relationships, friendship and falling in love?

Where can you find these groups?

There are recovery work groups and recovery colleges in many places, but you sometimes have to search for them. Ask your care provider or a peer organisation what exists where you live.

Read more: What is the recovery movement? and Social holding and resource groups.

Prof. dr. Jim van Os, Chair Division Neuroscience, Utrecht University Medical Centre. Jim works at the interface of ‘hard’ brain science, health services research, art and subjective experiences of people with ‘lived experience’ in mental healthcare. 

Jim has been appearing on the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science list of ‘most influential scientific minds of our time’ since 2014. In 2014 he published his book ‘Beyond DSM-5‘, and in 2016 the book ‘Good Mental Health Care’. In 2026 he published 'Wat psychisch lijden is'.

Want to read more?

Blogs by Jim van Os can be read here

Did you know that PsychosisNet regularly posts new content?

Online tests 
Compare antidepressants tool
Compare antipsychotics tool
Podcasts
Books