Green Care: A Conceptual Framework - Frisk i naturen

6.10 Recovery model
‘The Recovery Model’ is much vaunted as an alternative to traditional
psychiatric practice, and has several relevant aspects to green care:
sustainability, holism, authenticity and a focus on growth and development.
Its critics maintain that it is ill-defined and rather diffuse as a concept
(perhaps shared with green care); this is generally rebutted by the
consideration that ‘recovery’ is defined by the service users who are in the
process of recovery themselves, and not by ‘experts’ who are telling them
how they should be.
Another aspect is to play down a focus on illness and pathology, and take
a more positive attitude – Cloninger (2006) describes “The Happy Life;
voyages to well-being”. A related venture, in the face of the relentless
rationalism of evidence based decision making, is work to define an
underlying value base: ‘evidence based practice’ may be necessary for
services and units to survive in the current climate, but many feel it is
not sufficient, at least in mental health. Fulford (2004) has related it to
principles of moral philosophy, and the Sainsburys Centre for Mental
Health has developed a workbook, by Woodbridge and Fulford (2005), for
practitioners to examine the values which underlie their practice. A value
which is rarely mentioned in academic writing, but frequently mentioned
as of importance in day-to-day green care or therapeutic community work
is that of understanding spiritual needs as well as biological, psychological
and social ones, and the power of working with nature to meet them. This
is now gaining widespread acceptance, and is described in this way by
Walters (1994):
“In variety, small communities cannot compete with cities. The
greatest satisfaction in the arts, however, lies in creating, not
merely in being entertained. In this area of life, the intentional
community could offer incomparably more than the big city:
the time to create, and interested audience, inspiring natural
surroundings, and an opportunity to explore and develop
one’s inner life.” (p. 30)
A collaborative UK project has produced the ‘Mental Health Recovery
Star’ (MacKeith and Burns, 2008), which is a 10-point, 10-scale self-rated
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