We usually look at the mental healthcare sector in the same way we look at other medical disciplines. You have a problem, you go to a specialist, they diagnose you and prescribe an evidence-based treatment. And if all goes well, you start getting better during this psychological and meaningful recovery.

However, with psychological suffering this model doesn’t always work.

What we actually see, is that people stay in treatment for years. There are diagnoses, protocols, treatments – and the suffering still continues. Sometimes its symptoms change, it becomes dormant, or comes back in waves. The treatment takes longer, and sometimes feels endless. It keeps feeling like one little piece of the puzzle is missing, and one last intervention will make a difference.

Slowly but surely we start to realise that this medical model is, in many cases, inadequate. Not because the specialists don’t try, but because the nature of psychological suffering requires something else: a pathway towards meaningful recovery.

Trying to recover from psychological suffering is hard work

Psychological suffering is a long-term, existential process. A process in which previous certainties disappear, in which pain, loneliness, and loss overwhelm you. It’s not an illness you can quickly cure. It’s an inner crisis that requires digging deep, reorientation, and yes, hard work too.

You need to learn how to deal with compelling and powerful forces in your mental space: your fears, your traumas, your sadness, your desperation, and your confusion. At the beginning, the balance between you and these forces is completely disproportionate. The forces seem a thousand times stronger than you. But gradually you can learn how to relate to them differently. You learn how to cope, structure, search, and above all: experiment.

And that’s where the problem lies, because the experiments that are necessary are seldom things that people want to do. You may have to change your lifestyle, reconsider your relationship with yourself, reorganise your social circle, and rediscover your purpose. But most of all: learn to face your fears and traumas instead of avoiding them. That requires bravery. That is the real work of meaningful recovery.

What do you need for this?

Not an endless amount of specialists.

What you need is someone who can help you figure out that work. Someone who can help you create clarity: what is happening to me? What do I need to do?

And then – instead of another year of treatment with a specialist – you are not put on hold or referred to someone else. You are being discharged from specialist care, with the confidence you can do this.

However, you are not left behind on your own.

Psychological and meaningful recovery

You gain access to something that is much more important than a treatment room: holding space.

A place, group, or community you can go to whenever you need. Where people hold, motivate, and inspire each other. Where it’s OK to fail. Groups in which the process of recovery, purpose, and transformation is shared.

This community can exist within the Dutch mental healthcare sector, but also in recovery academies, social circles, neighbourhoods, peers, or in complementary and alternative healthcare.

The keyphrase is: continuity of connection, not treatment.

Not fixing, but supporting

The specialists are still important – but take on a different role. Not a fixing specialist who solves your problem, but an expert who temporarily brainstorms and sympathises with you. Who helps you make sense of your suffering, and helps you get to a place where you can really work on yourself. Connected, and moving forwards. Living life to the fullest.

This is how a new model is created.

A mental healthcare sector where the focus doesn’t just lie on endless treatments, but on supporting meaningful recovery in Dutch mental healthcare. Where the input of the specialist suits your process – and where the real work happens in everyday life, with other people.

Because ultimately, it’s not the guidelines, but the relationships that carry us.

Translated from Dutch by S.G.M. Taplin