How KBT are working with Recovery

Text by Christina Kildal og Elisabeth Asphaug Rauboti. Translated by: Anne R. Benschop and Christina Kildal

How KBT works with recovery

KBT believes that good help is based on the service user’s needs and wishes, making it possible to work together in finding opportunities for personal development and ways to work with own challenges. We believe that there is resources and abilities in every person, which together with right kind of support can be used to cope in daily life and achieve a good and worthy life despite mental health or substance abuse problems. This is right at the core of the recovery concept, which is why KBT strives for more recovery-oriented practices in health services.

Our visions states that we work for better services through equal dialogue between service users and professionals. When it comes to user participation at individual level, KBT thinks that recovery is one of the areas contributing to increased user participation. It is in our interest to explore what recovery means for each person and important elements in recovery processes, to make it possible for health services to form more accurate services.

In a larger perspective at civic level, recovery is also about human rights, working life and social arenas. These are areas important to KBT because we mean that aspects concerning society, working life, economy, housing, social life and environments greatly affects people’s health. We want to work for inclusion in working life, better housing, information about rights and better attitudes towards and knowledge about mental health and substance abuse problems.

Our working areas on recovery

KBT wants to contribute to this by documentation and dissemination of lived experience about recovery processes. Among other things we bring forward recovery in User Interviews User-evaluations of health services, dialogue meetings with municipalities and services, and in lecrures and webinars. We also offer courses aiming to strengthen persons and groups.

 

User Interviews User

Recovery has been in KBT`s interests for a long time, and we have conducted several projects and agencies highlighting recovery. User Interviews User is a way to work recovery oriented with basis in users thoughts about changes and processes in services. A recent example is User Interviews User – Evaluation of Sagatun Peer-Driven Center, where we asked the users of Sagatun about their thoughts and experiences regarding recovery, and how Sagatun contributed to their recovery process through activities and being a community center. Follow the link to read more about the project and findings.

Network for Recovery in Central Norway

In 2018 we initiated a regional network for recovery in Central Norway, which aims to gather people with interests in recovery, to exchange experiences and share knowledge. This is now a cooperate between KBT, NAPHA, Trondheim municipality, Vårres Brukerstyrt Senter, Fontenehuset Trondheim and KoRus. We aim to have one meeting per semester. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we mooved the meetings to the digital platform Zoom. That actually also made it easier for people from outside of Trondheim to participate on the meetings.