One thing about Spring is that it brings new energy to a growing group of people across North Carolina who want to bring our system to currency in its focus.   We seek a public system that produces real life outcomes, experienced by service users as strengths-based support of their self-determination AND self-responsibility so they can own their own choices and value them a in important part of their path to reclaim lives that are meaningful and growing! 

In 2014, NC CANSO worked with many others to develop North Carolinians for Recovery Oriented Care (NC ROCs) which aims to influence state and MCO level policies so that we actually have a the right type and quality of services that help people to recover, no longer focusing more on a medical approach and mere symptom reduction with plenty of hospital beds, but a mind-body-social-spiritual one.  Because this is what it takes to minimize crises and hospitalization and to help people develop their own lives that are not defined by a diagnosis!   Also, this March the planning committee of the One Community in Recovery Conference offered in the autumn will be meeting to get things rolling again for another outstanding conference!

COLLABORATING FOR ADVOCACY!  A Petition developed:  Participants with NC ROCS share a concern about proposed federal legislation HB 3717, “The Murphy Bill” about which we have already written on this site.  It reduces civil liberties of persons with symptoms in favor of forced treatment, proposing hostile engagement rather than the welcoming and respectful engagement that underpins service that help people to recover.  It also greatly reduces funding to protection and advocacy agencies like our own Disability Rights NC, our state’s Protection and Advocacy System, which has intervened to ensure the rights of our peers in adult care homes are respected, for instance, and which does believe in supporting recovery.  The bill also returns more funding to medically based approaches and threatens the viability of psychiatric rehabilitation models by shifting away from recovery and back to a crisis and symptom management approach.    If you share our concern, you can go to the NC ROCs google website, https://sites.google.com/site/nc4recovery/ to view the NC ROCs petition statement on this bill (NC CANSO contributed to the document) as well as a link to a NC based petition to oppose this bill.  PLEASE CONTRIBUTE YOUR SUPPORT TO FIGHTING THIS BILL unless it is greatly revised or dropped.