Our mission at Colorado Recovery is to provide services in the community to adults with serious mental illness that will stabilize their illness, minimize symptoms, improve functioning and enhance each person’s social inclusion, quality of life and sense of meaning in life.
We can’t achieve this mission using medications alone, however effective they may be. We have to help our clients find enjoyable work and decent housing, build strong relationships with family members and others, feel that they are contributing something valuable to the world around them and get some fun out of life. The services we provide as we aim to make this happen can be termed Psychiatric Rehabilitation.
There have been several major advances in the field of psychiatric rehabilitation in the past 25 years or so, but the origins of this work go back much further. In the pages of this section we will describe the principles required to make it possible for people with serious mental illness to re-enter society as full, participating members and lay out some of the evidence that demonstrates which social interventions can be most effective.
Included among the approaches described here are vocational services; how we can provide support and education to families; restoring our client’s strengths and abilities through such interventions as cognitive behavioral therapy and the psychosocial clubhouse model, like Colorado Recovery’s Treehouse.
