Psychiatric Rehabilitation Consultants (PRC)

In 2006, the Federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) convened a panel of more than 110 experts to define the term "Recovery" for Consumers with Serious and Persistent Mental Illness. The consensus panel included more than 110 representatives from the consumer, family, provider, researcher, managed care, and local public official communities and concluded that “recovery” encompasses 10 overlapping characteristics. All of PRC's products and services embody these characteristics.

Self-Direction: Consumers lead, control, and exercise choice over their paths to recovery.
Individualized and Person-Centered: There are multiple roads to recovery depending on each consumer’s unique strengths, resiliencies, needs, preferences, and cultural background.
Empowerment: Consumers have the authority and power to participate in all decisions that will affect their lives. They have the ability to join with other consumers to collectively and effectively voice needs, wants, desires, and aspirations. Through a combination of this authority, knowledge, and skills, a consumer has the power to control the organizational and societal structures that affect his or her life. and live a meaningful and satisfying life.
Holistic: Recovery embraces all aspects of a consumer’s life including housing, employment, education, mental and physical healthcare, and complementary community services (such as recreational services, libraries, museums, etc.),
Non-Linear: Recovery is not a step-by-step process but one based on continual growth, occasional setbacks, and learning from experience. Recovery begins with an initial stage of awareness in which a person recognizes that positive change is possible.
Strengths-Based: Recovery focuses on valuing and building on the multiple capacities, resiliencies, skills, coping abilities, and inherent worth of individuals. By building on these strengths, consumers leave behind unfulfilling lives and engage in new, more rewarding, and meaningful roles.
Peer Support: Mutual support—including the sharing of experiential knowledge and skills plays an invaluable role in recovery. Consumers encourage and engage each other their paths to recovery. and provide each other with a sense of belonging, supportive relationships,
Respect: Community and societal acceptance of and appreciation of consumers are crucial in achieving recovery. Respect ensures the inclusion and full participation of consumers in ALL aspects of their lives.
Responsibility: Consumers take personal responsibility for their own paths to recovery. Taking responsibility may require great courage. Consumers must strive to understand the meaning of their experiences and identify coping strategies to promote their own wellness.
Hope: Recovery provides the essential and motivating message of a better future— that people can and do overcome the barriers and obstacles that confront them. Hope is internalized; but can be fostered by peers, families, friends, providers, and others. Hope energizes the recovery process.