ARCHES Recovery College is a Recovery Education Service. Recovery Education is an approach to supporting people with mental health difficulties, their family members/supporters, and mental health professionals. It is based on the theory and practice of adult education, rather than clinical or therapeutic models.

Recovery Education offers people a choice to engage in a broad range of self-directed, transformative learning opportunities to develop knowledge, skills and abilities; self-manage mental health; improve quality of life; promote personal growth; and ultimately flourish.

Rather than solely focusing on clinical recovery (symptoms and functioning), Recovery Education helps people in the process of pursuing personal (self-defined) recovery and wellbeing. This can involve being connected to others; holding hope for the future; having an identity separate from mental health difficulties; living a meaningful, fulfilling, and significant life; and feeling like your life story makes sense and has a purpose.

Recovery Education uses the power of lived experience: sharing with each other what it is like to experience mental health difficulties, how life challenges can throw us off course, and how we can transcend and overcome suffering.

Importantly, Recovery Education is coproduced, meaning that all courses are developed by service users, their family members/supporters, and mental health professionals collaborating.

Our programme

Take a look at some example courses and click on the link below to view all.

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