Preamble: The Recovery Protocol Breakthrough operates on two sites. The site you are currently on is called the Home Site, and the second site is known as the Program Site. This program site is linked and accessed via the home site as is the home site accessed through this secondary site. The home site sets the stage for understanding the context for making a recovery and its relationship to medication failure. The program site presents instructions for the implementation of this protocol.

The Recovery Protocol Breakthrough is a dynamic program designed for consumers with their service providers, offering a transformative way to “recovery” for those languishing with anxiety and depressive conditions due to medications being not enough. As a program, it addresses the impact of “medication failure” on the person’s quality of living, autonomy, empowerment, and psyche. When recovery is activated, research over the past 30 years has reported people tend to realize greater freedom at the helm of their lives, a stronger sense of self, and an improved quality of living. This is a freeing experience where The Illness (anxiety & depression conditions) operates from a weakened position where its grip, strength, and influence have diminished, over time, and they have lost their central position in the person’s life. With this loss of footing, the individuals regain being at the center of their lives while the anxieties and depression are relegated to the sidelines ceasing the degree of hold they once held.

Recovery Defined
There are many definitions of recovery. However, to contextualize recovery from Citizens Psychiatry’s vantage, here is the following description,

Personal Recovery can be described as a self-directed, transformative, and collaborative journey of discovery and learning that fosters a person’s alignment with their values and capabilities. This alignment places the individual at the center of their life, living with greater value, meaning, and purpose. This journey changes the mental illness trajectory, where the Illness’s grip, strength, and influence lessens due to the person’s degree of autonomy and empowerment increasing. As a result, the journey builds a person’s sense of “agency” and “hopefulness” to succeed in making a recovery possible.

Why would “Recovery” matter to you?
One chief disadvantage of relying on medications alone can be seen in the analogy depicted in the diagram below. The stool in diagram A, shows the weight of a person’s life and the mental illness (s), as illustrated by the single support column seat representing medications alone carry the person’s life weight. These psychotropic drugs are now known by research not to be able to withstand the full weight of one’s life, which includes the mental health condition (s) but are meant to ensure enough treatment support to give some room to rest and re-energize, as the symptoms dampen, thereby allowing for greater function, in theory. While this may work with a few, for most people, the stress of the single support column becomes too great to hold their full life weight and thus this beam begins to strain, buckle, and sway under this duress. This is an emotionally precarious and vulnerable position to find oneself.  Over time, a person can feel the weight of life seemingly becoming heavier along with the mental health condition (s) held, leaving them with the fear of buckling under this strain at any time. This is where a medication failure begins, and medication trials ensue.

The individual stress of not getting any relief from medications impacts how the person feels about their sense of self and their view of living in negative ways, over time. This is on top of the stress created by the mental health symptoms. As this nature of stress grows, it is well known that this duress can diminish medication performance. In turn, the medication column weakens even more and gives way to being off work on disability, emergency room visitations, missed work days, stressed relationships, or hospital stays, which can become a repetitive cycle and costly to both families and livelihoods.

At this point, recommendations for psychotherapy can be offered to provide an additional support leg as seen in diagram B. Research has demonstrated that when psychotherapy is added, medications work better, and people can function better in their lives. This is partly due to the redistribution of the weight of the mental health illness (s) and their lives carried, as read in the “Fable” on the Introduction page. This weight is now shared by two columns instead of one. However, for some people, this combination is still not enough. This is where the Recovery Protocol Breakthrough program enters the picture and is entertained, whether with psychotherapy or not. As noted in diagram (B), this adds a missing 3rd column of support rarely addressed directly in psychotherapy or allied professions and not by physician providers. This program addresses the diminished sense of “agency” and “hopefulness,” which lowers the empowerment and autonomy of a person, in part, due to medications not being enough.

Like psychotherapy, recovery orientation, according to research, has demonstrated that as a person’s function and quality of life increase, medications can become more responsive or lose their value as the person regains a stronger sense of self. This elevation of personhood is empowering. The Recovery Protocol Breakthrough has taken the recovery-orientation model of success even further and added a systematic step-by-step process that can be applied within the meeting room of the service provider to offer a “Recovery Plus Advantage” to directly massage the person’s diminished sense of self as a result of continuing medication non-responsiveness. Whereas with recovery orientation applied its success is based on setting a climate or atmosphere whether that be in the meeting room or community services that can hold a person in a recovery mode. This breakthrough protocol, however, brings together both of these critical elements into a unified program.

How?
The first step is Priming, which involves setting the foundation for recovery. The home site you’re on is dedicated to Priming. Here, individuals and mental health service providers are exposed to such themes such as,
a) why make a recovery your mission
b) medication failure as a silent condition not talked about
c) the erosion of a recovery mindset as a result of medications not being enough
d) what is recovery like and what is involved
e) what can be achieved by making a recovery
f) use of Flash Drive Forms
g) how is recovery complementary to medications and psychotherapy
h) the value of functional medicine in psychiatry’s focus on diet, nutrients, and lifestyle behaviors
i) recovery’s value to mental health service providers
j) the determining of an individual’s recovery profile and status as an indication for Recovery Health.

The second step focuses on implementing the program. Here, step-by-step instructions are outlined in the chapters on Session Protocol Practices and in the operating manual, Standards & Practices. There are three sections to the program which envelops the Flash Drive Forms which is conducted over ten months. Within the provider’s meeting room space, specially designed scripts for conducting “Recovery-Based Interview” (R.B.I.) are provided that massage a person’s sense of empowerment. In doing so, this leads to carrying the weight and stress of the mental illness and their lives in a manner that is more freeing and person-centered rather than illness-centered and constricted.

The following chart below delineates the choices and options the program offers to complement medications and psychotherapy or as a stand-alone approach.

The Flash Drive Forms
Have you as a consumer ever had something you want to get off your chest or is personally vital in your mind to the treatment with your psychiatric provider, but got tongue-tied and could not recall or not know how to form the right words to say what you need to within the tight time limits of the appointment? Or have there been times when the appointments were consistently focused on symptoms, medications, problems, and illness management that there was no space for questions asked of you about what drives your life, or what is important to your living, leaving you in the end to feel you are not seen and don’t count as much as the mental illness. There may have been times when you leave the appointment wondering about where things at in the treatment or where it is going but not knowing how to get the answers. Further, you may feel you are caught in a cultural norm where you are told the psychiatric provider is “THE” expert on your life and mental illnesses and therefore there is nothing of value you can share or bring to these appointments to add to one’s treatment formulation.  In such cases, this leaves you as a passive and not an active player in treatment. Here, a greater psychological dependence is built where the consumer is pinning all hopes on getting the treatment right, that being medications. Do any of these sentiments feel familiar? In the end, for many consumers they walk away from the meeting room feeling unheard and not listened to, a very disheartening feeling coming with a caveat, “They don’t get me.” What is rarely considered is the negative impact these sentiments have on treatment success and on recovery, especially, with folks experiencing medication failure with seemingly no end in sight.

To provide a way to address these sentiments The Flash Drive Forms were developed to bring consumers into the treatment equation as a vital factor and also for the recovery equation to enter the room with whoever one’s service provider is. These forms when completed become the voice of the consumer and offer insights on what matters to their life while at the same time looking at the hurdles faced that require attention as they can be significant factors feeding into the life of mental health condition (s). With these forms, consumers become active players in treatment and in making a recovery. The information the forms gathered would typically take multiple sessions to gather thereby eating up valuable time that can be devoted to getting results. The Flash Drive Forms when completed gathers this information in one sitting, taking up 30 minutes or less of one’s time to complete. With these forms, they offer the means for one to know where they are going and where they are in their treatment or recovery. As a client or patient, one can now get the right information to the provider without having to always fumble or remember what to say. The Flash Drive Forms also present the neglected half of treatment, the recovery equation, by highlighting the engagement of one’s strengths and capabilities to improve one’s mental health status.

The Report Card Analysis
The report card is a special feature of the program. It is an experiential measure of one’s recovery profile and status with the mental health conditions of focus that depict the status of one’s Recovery Health. The data entered into the Flash Drive Forms, sections 1 and 2, is translated by the section on The Report Card and analyzed based on the guidelines outlined here. A person’s recovery profile captures one’s present recovery position or leanings whether towards a position of illness-centered living, a weak recovery position, or more person-centered living, a strong recovery position. In contrast, the recovery status looks at the state of attachment pressures felt by what the mental illness exerts with respect to its grip, influence, and strength. In a strong recovery position, the attachment pressures diminish allowing room and space for greater person-led living. In a weak recovery position, a greater degree of tension is experienced with a stronger attachment to the mental health condition (s) leaving a person in more of an illness-driven position. Taken together, they spell out an individual’s Recovery Health in this report card analysis.

Reflections

Recovery means re-holding the weight and stress of these mental illness conditions differently and in a manner that is exceptionally more freeing to one’s life than is presently experienced by aligning and exercising one’s strengths, values, and mental health building. This alignment allows one to reorient a life from the weight carried by illness-centered living to a person-centered orientation of strength, a freeing position. This program shows you how -The Fable

Terms of Use:  This program is for consumers with medication failure. No fees are required. Permission is granted to print materials from this site without prior consent from the site administrator. The consumer can port this protocol and introduce it to their non-clinical or clinical provider. The objective is to put into play this protocol to kick-start a recovery since medications are offering poor treatment returns, which is impacting a person’s quality of life and functioning from a recovery perspective.

Disclaimer:  The information provided on this site does not constitute medical advice or treatment. The information acts only as a guide to consider the elements for making recovery possible and how to institute such a program of practice within the Meeting Room space of one’s service provider.