Recoverism

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About

Recoverism is a political, visible, activist, social movement born in the North West of England, allied to the arts, harnessing social change and emancipation by re-framing cultural identities around substance use disorder. Recoverists and Recoverism were imagined by Clive Parkinson Director of Arts for Health, MMU and Mark Prest, founding director of the international arts and recovery organisation Portraits of Recovery (PORe), during I AM: Memoirs of Addiction Recovery and in the first Recoverist Manifesto (Parkinson, 2014) with an introduction by Will Self.​ (English and Italian).

Manifesto also here: ‪ http://artsforhealth.org/resources/RecoveristManifestoVersion1.pdf

Definition

recoverist |rɪˈkʌv(ə)rist|

noun (plural recoverists) [mass noun]

1 a person who is pro-actively pursuing life beyond substance addiction and/or mental distress pursuing a positive state of health and wellbeing. | [count noun] : Sam was irritated by public misunderstanding of the factors that influenced her/his life choices and became a recoverist.

2 the action or process of regaining possession or control of your identity: a group of people with diverse backgrounds but who had encountered similar prejudices reclaimed their sense of shared and individual identities as recoverists.

• the action of regaining pride and imagining new possibilities beyond stigma and cliché through shared action as part of a movement : recoverism.

·     a cultural and political movement reframing and humanising the lived experience of substance misuse and or mental distress away from biomedical models, pathologies and criminalisation :  proactive recoverism.

ORIGIN

From recovery, late Middle English (denoting a means of restoration): from Anglo-Norman French recoverie, from recovrer ‘get back’.

Early recoverist projects:

I AM: Memoirs of Addiction Recovery

I AM: Memoirs of Addiction Recovery, where the Recoverist Manifesto was developed through a discreet piece of action research with people in recovery in Liverpool and Manchester (UK), Pescara and Pistoia (Italy) and Istanbul and Kütahya (Turkey). The Recoverist Manifesto has been shared in Australia, Estonia, Turkey, Italy, Holland, Ireland and the UK where material has been gathered for a second iteration. A contextual film framing the Recoverist Manifesto is online

Wonderland: the art of becoming human

Wonderland: the art of becoming human Led by Amanda Ravetz and Mark Prest of PORe, with artist Cristina Nunez, and recoverist activists Michaela Jones, Jayne Gosnall and Alistair Sinclair.

Recoverism and the Arts

Recoverism and the Arts: Driving change through collaborative research, 25^th May 2017, the first international recoverist conference, funded by Alcohol Research UK, the Arts and Health Research Group and the Substance Use & Addictive Behaviours research Group (both MMU).

References

This article "Recoverism" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Recoverism. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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