Catalogue Number
NMLH.2025.4.3
Object Name
badge
Title
'Unrecovery'
Place
UK
People
Recovery in the Bin, NHS
Description
A white badge with an eleven point star. The centre of the star says 'UnRecovery' and the points (clockwise from top) say: 'Poverty, Loss of rights, Unstable housing, Sexism, Transphobia/Homophobia, Discrimination, Economic Inequality, Racism, Trauma, Loss of Welfare State'.
Recovery in the Bin is a collective of people who have had contact with mental health services and feel that currently mental health care does not engage with the ways societal conditions like poverty, austerity, and discrimination impact mental health. The recovery star is a generic tool used in mental health services - each point of the star is a broad area like 'relationships' 'work' or 'living skills' that the patient should work to change in order to 'recover'. The recovery star is very focused on the individual as the cause of their own ill health, rather than any societal factors.
Recovery in the Bin explains the Unrecovery Star's purpose as:
"the âUnRecovery Starâ can be described as a âSocial Justice toolâ, which highlights the reasons why we go Mad, but also what can hinder our ârecoveryâ and maintain our distress. We really mean it when we say some of us will never feel ârecoveredâ due to the social and economic conditions we experience because they frame everything. Therefore, the âUnRecovery Starâ is political as well as personal, both intrinsically linked for many of us.
The strength of the âUnRecovery Starâ is being used as a teaching tool, in order to highlight social inequalities that exist and are still prominent in society, and helping students make those links to the causes of mental distress. The âUnRecovery Starâ clarifies that peopleâs problems are not merely individual problems rooted in something wrong with an individual person such as a faulty brain, genetic abnormality, or faulty personality. The âUnRecovery Starâ clarifies that humans are social beings and that the determinants of distress are to be found in families, communities, wider society, and social policies. The value of the âUnRecovery Starâ is that it demonstrates that we need to not just pay attention to distressed people, but deal with the problems that exist in communities and wider society, that mental health is a profoundly political issue."
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