Civic Recovery Mentorship: An Online Undergraduate Medical Training Program to Transform Experience into Expertise, and Attitudes into Competencies

Author(s):

Jean-Francois Pelletier*

While recovery is the current leading paradigm in the transformation of mental health systems throughout the world, recovery principles and values are slowly and quietly also embracing physical health for continuity and holistic health. A key feature of recovery-oriented systems is to have patients or former patients involved as active partners, for instance in the provision of care for them to act as recovery mentors. Informal peer-to-peer relationships are certainly not new. What is still relatively new is that there now exist a variety of formal programs to train recovery mentors, for them to perform this role either in complex multidisciplinary medical teams or in community organizations. This paper describes a first online and for credit program of medical training of recovery mentors. To complete their training the recovery mentor apprentices will need to show, in real clinical or community contexts, that they do master nine key attitudes. In alphabetical order, these attitudes are: altruism, empathy, engagement, honesty and integrity, humility, open-mindedness, respect, rigor, and sense of responsibility. We suggest that the pedagogical approach to teach how to express these attitudes need to be based more on principles of adult education (andragogy) than on those of youth education (pedagogy) in order to facilitate the emulation of recovery.