Recovery Star or crucifix?

I loved the original concept of recovery: "Regaining what has been lost or taken away". And I grieve for the way it is being used as a tool for discipline.


@TallaTrialogue presented a link and wrote:  

"A brilliant way of helping to measure outcomes in Recovery for both service users and services."

http://www.recoverywirral.com/2013/12/the-recovery-star-a-brilliant-way-of-helping-to-measure-outcomes-in-recovery-for-both-service-users-and-services-start-your-own-star-today/

When I was having severe dissociation problems, shoving this star with its checkboxes at me would have made me even more confused: 

Embedding some tweets with links:

"The [Mental Health Recovery Star] cannot be recommended as a routine clinical outcome tool...." http://t.co/LAtx2rxlRf
— Andy Fugard (@inductivestep) January 12, 2014

@maddoggiejo @psychwatch2 @maxbenjamin1 Also HoNOS, which some don't trust as linked to care clusters in PbR trials https://t.co/IfiwlFD7i9
— Andy Fugard (@inductivestep) January 13, 2014

@maddoggiejo called this star "A cross that they nail you to". Here is her version:

http://www.docdroid.net/file/view/84zc/the-recovery-star-by-dr-joanna.pdf

And she has these suggestions for backup interventions: 

Reading PDF document on the recovery Star made me think of Leanh Ngyen's excruciating and beautiful paper on "The Ethics of Trauma": 

During the Physicians for Human Rights evaluations of the Iraqis, some of the men laughed incredulously upon reading the questionnaires. One man looked at the items in a studious, puzzled way. Another said, “What is this?” One man pushed the questionnaire away in despair. “I can’t do this. I don’t understand this.” Another man eventually refused to continue and said to me, “What you want to know, just ask me.”

Just ask me.

These reactions conveyed to me that the clinician-listener-witness was failing her traumatized subject in the task that the historian Dominick LaCapra (2001) has called “remaining in empathic unsettlement”: to stay unsettled in order to look at, not past or beyond, the subject. To stay in the not knowing and trying to know with the subject—such is the task that we may be failing when we unquestioningly engage in “empirical” standardized testing of traumatized people.