Recovery in the sense of recovering perspective

Besides places you can go to, there are apps that can contribute to your recovery process. A signalling plan and the crisis card are valuable tools, and a great deal of material is available on the internet, such as hopeful and inspiring recovery stories.

Recovery colleges

“Going through a psychosis is a complicated matter. So is recovering from it. After a psychosis there is always a future; recovery is possible.”

To work on recovery in the sense of recovering perspective, a person needs access to a well-equipped recovery college. This is a place where the person can get out from under their demoralisation and learn to get a grip on life again.

Within recovery colleges there are learning groups such as WRAP, hearing voices groups, medication management groups, groups around unbearable distress, retreats and other activities.

To work on taking part, the person needs access to recovery coaching and job coaching that promote participation in housing, work, study, wellbeing, relationships and other activities.

Social holding

Social holding is an important concept that is often needed in the learning process around psychosis susceptibility. It is the whole of the support someone needs to stay on their feet in society, despite the fact that their behaviour is sometimes ‘different’.

Social holding also includes being able to carry out social experiments in living, working, housing, education, sport, parenthood and family life: everything you need to be able to ‘do your thing’.

Resource groups

Resource groups play an important part in social holding. This is often supplemented with the crisis card, retreats, peer-supported open dialogue and FACT, with the possibility of scaling up to intensive treatment at home.

Social enterprise

Social enterprise around psychosis susceptibility is a beginning trend. Doing business is much more than making a profit. More and more entrepreneurs want their company to contribute to solving social problems.

Here and there mental health care tries to work together with social enterprises aimed at ‘profit’ in the form of participation, connection and meaning. This is a movement that will hopefully grow in the coming years.

It is sometimes hard to find the right help

Be prepared for the fact that in many places the complete range of help is hard to find. Medication and regular contact with a mental health nurse can usually be found.

The value of recovery environments

What is often much needed are recovery environments such as:

• A recovery college
• Social holding
• Recovery coaching
• Job coaching
• Coaching in education
• Daytime activities
• Treatments without medication
• Peer support
• Housing

“What help with psychosis is about is standing by the person and the people close to them in a personal and often difficult process of learning to ‘do your thing’ as far as possible, despite a more than average psychosis susceptibility.”

Medical care and social care are often not well aligned

The activities of mental health care (medical care) are often not well aligned with those of local authorities (social care), and the activities of different mental health organisations are often not well aligned with each other either. Mental health care also often works with specialist care lines, so that the treatment of one person is sometimes spread over 3 different lines, which does not work well.

Working with an old-fashioned medical model of illness

There are also still care providers who want to work according to an old-fashioned medical model of illness (for example by acting weightily about the diagnosis ‘schizophrenia’ as if it represents real knowledge), and who are not used to working on the basis of equality, understanding together and deciding together.

Care providers not seldom work in their own way without anyone ever really watching with them in the consulting room and holding up a mirror about how they function. Professionals often find this kind of peer review threatening and so prefer to leave each other alone. Finding your way in mental health care can therefore take quite some searching.

Fortunately there are places where it all goes well

Read more about the recovery process in What is recovery?, Tools for your recovery and the CHIME framework of recovery.

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

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