Recovery International—A Complement to Clinical Practice

Recovery International interviews Earl N. Solon, MD, a Chicago-based psychiatrist.

Recovery: Tell us your history with Recovery International and how your patients have responded to the Recovery Method and meetings.

Solon: My interest in Recovery International dates back to 1971. Since then I have dovetailed this resource with my clinical work and have developed a continuing respect for its helpfulness. With it, treatment is not only strengthened, but shortened and accelerated. The patient's suffering is abbreviated, remissions are reinforced, defenses against relapse are strengthened and the overall expense is reduced.

Recovery: How does Recovery work with professional therapeutic care?

Solon: Therapy itself seems to be the major benefit of Recovery International. I see my patients in Recovery doing much better clinically than those with comparable problems not in a Recovery group.

Recovery is complementary to therapy and not competitive with it. It will be to our enrichment as professionals to be aware of its available asset to our patients' health. To a clinician, Recovery's constituency is surprising. The organization offers something of value for nearly everyone.

Basically, Recovery is a support and training process, useful in reinforcing the therapist's objectives in treatment, helping the patient sustain himself between visits and avoid acting out. With the enrichment from this support, therapy is accelerated, its overall cost is reduced and duration of morbidity is decreased.

It is a concept that has been ahead of its time but remains ready for practicable applications if professionals examine and appreciate its potential. For some of my patients, it has been the difference between their being able to function in society or being chronically disabled by illness. At its worst, when a patient fails to use it, the consequences of exposure to it are always benign.

Recovery: Can you break down for us how Recovery helps your patients, based on their illnesses?

Solon: Schizophrenics are helped in maintaining contact with consensus versions of reality despite an overflow of internal stimuli that interferes with such contact. They find directions for sustaining contact with others despite the counter-flow of feelings of alienation.

Depressives become aware of alternative to patterns of subtle self-injury and self-denigration. They learn to rebuild self esteem in the face of depressive feelings that used to influence them to the contrary.

Phobic patients utilize Recovery concepts to evade damage to their self-image that previous indulgence in the phobia would deliver.

Neurotic patients, and even family members of patients, report personally beneficial illumination that enriches their own abilities to cope with the vicissitudes of the illness.

Recovery: What would you tell other clinicians about the complement of Recovery International to the care they provide their patients?

Solon: Recovery's equipment is simple. It consists of regular meetings in a consistent location, a body of structured and tested information, tools for coping, provision of a common language, and trained and experienced leaders.

In addition, Recovery supplies a system of philosophies and orientations, too numerous to describe here, which are useful in sustaining emotional equilibrium. In order to benefit from Recovery, its philosophies and orientations have to be put into use.

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