The implications of the loss of self-respect for the recovery model in mental healthcare

Abstract

According to the recovery model, mental healthcare should be aimed towards a conception of recovery articulated by a patient or service user in accord with his or her own specific values. The model thus presupposes and emphasises the agency of the patient and opposes paternalism. Recent philosophical work on the relations between respect, self-respect, self-esteem, shame, and agency suggests, however, two ways in which mental illness itself can undermine self-respect, promote shame and undermine agency, suggesting a tension within the recovery model. I argue, however, that this is a tension rather than a fatal flaw by distinguishing between paternalist and non-paternalist clinical responses to this failure of agency.