Wh-enLightening strikes
Helen Glover of enLightened Consultants with Jeff Cheverton of Queensland Alliance.
Helen Glover says she believes people in the mental health industry need to shift their focus to the person rather than the illness, in order to help their recovery.
Connect caught up with Helen at Brisbane's inaugural mental health conference - Altering States, Creating Futures - to find out what she meant when she told the audience,"I'm not down on systems, I just think we need to keep asking questions".
Helen says when we focus on the illness we start to see ourselves as being defined by that illness and enter into what she terms "consumer participation".
"We should be responding to need in a changing and growing context," Helen says."But instead our service tradition has been to label someone and allocate support. When that support becomes 'modelised' we run the risk of getting in the way of actual recovery."
Helen's work assists government and non-government providers of mental health services to support the efforts of people to recover from mental illness, rather than being passive participants in the mental health system. Her philosophy is to help them self-manage their lives, with or without symptoms - this is what she terms recovery-based practice.
"People will attempt to reclaim their lives despite and in spite of mental health service," Helen says."Recovery-based practice is not so much our ability to come up with answers but to remain curious to what remains unknown. The concept of recovery is organic and is usually realised as a person overcomes their identity with illness."
In Helen's view, the limitations lie in our service culture of creating programs or models in a system that only respond to the person's label of illness or disability.
"What doctors don't ask is - What do those symptoms mean to you? What did you do before you came to me? What support mechanisms do you already have in place?"
Following career success in the United Kingdom as chief executive officer of CHANGE, an organisation focused on residential and community crisis recovery from mental health difficulties, Helen accepted a post with Queensland Health in 2004 to develop and deliver a recovery-based training curriculum for the mental health workforce.
Armed with a professional background in education and social work, Helen now works primarily within Australia with government and non-government bodies in training and advocating for system change towards a person-centred and recovery-orientated service delivery.
Last updated November 2007