National Empowerment Center Mission: To carry a message of recovery, empowerment, hope and healing to people with lived experience with mental health issues, trauma, and extreme states.
Personal Assistance in Community Existence - A Recovery Guide (PDF)
This curriculum has been developed by Laurie Ahern and Dan Fisher MD, Ph.D. It includes a 34-page guide and a 90-minute video lecture on the PACE (Personal Assistance in Community Existence) curriculum, featuring information on the empowerment model of recovery, PACE/Recovery principles, and recovery research. This information is useful for administrators, consumers, families, advocates, and providers who want to transform their system to one based on a recovery culture. (National Empowerment Center)
NEC conducted qualitative research with people who were severely mentally ill but have met criteria for recovery, from which 10 major principles of how people recover were extracted:
- Trusting Oneself and Others
- Valuing Self-Determination
- Believing You'll Recover and Having Hope
- Believing in the Person's Full Potential
- Connecting at a Human, Deeply Emotional Level
- Appreciating That People Are Always Making Meaning
- Having a Voice of One's Own
- Validating All Feelings and Thoughts
- Following Meaningful Dreams
- Relating With Dignity and Respect
- Healing From Emotional Distress
- Transformation From Severe Emotional Distress.
- Recovery From Mental Illness.
NEC research also identified characteristics distinguishing those in illness and those in recovery:
- Dependent vs self-determining
- Mental health system support vs Network of friends support
- Identify solely as consumer or mental patient vs identify as worker, parent, student or other role
- Medication essential vs one tool that may be chosen
- Strong emotions treated as symptoms by professionals vs worked through and communicated with peers
- Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) score of 60 or below and untrained person would describe labeled person as sick vs score of 61 or above and untrained person would describe the recovered person as not sick (normal)
- Weak sense of self defined by authority and little future direction vs strong self defined from within and peers, strong sense of purpose and future
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