'What Recovery Means to Me'
'What Recovery Means to Me'
'What Recovery Means to Me': Our new creative project for the SWEDA community
'What Recovery Means to Me’ is a new collaborative project from SWEDA alongside all of the people who might have something to say about recovery from an eating disorder. This includes people who have, or have had an eating disorder, their loved-ones, clinicians who work with them and people who study eating disorders.
‘Recovery’ is one of the go-to terms when talking about eating disorders. SWEDA want recovery for all of our clients, but what does it really mean? Nerissa, our clinical lead feels that recovery means different things to different people and that the best way to understand more about recovery is to ask the people who know best!
We hope that this page will turn into a library of experience from everyone with a stake in the question of recovery, that will help us better understand eating disorders and the individual, unique, people behind the illnesses. We hope that it will inspire hope, encourage understanding, and help people to think about what their own recovery really means.
Here are our reflections so far:
Sarah's story (content warning: mention of eating disorder behaviours)
How to take part
Whether you have lived experience of an eating disorder, or have supported somebody else affected by an eating disorder, we’d be grateful to hear your own reflections on recovery. You could take part by submitting a short essay, a video clip, art piece, poem or any other medium you would like to create.
The guidelines for “What Recovery Means to Me” are deliberately open because SWEDA recognises that recovery means different things to different people and that there is no one way to recover ‘correctly’ and no one perspective on what it means to be ‘recovered’. So, if you decide to take part, you are free to interpret the title however you like, from your unique perspective. Here are some suggestions on how you could respond to the prompt:
- Written pieces (blogposts, essays, poems) – up to 800 words.
- For videos, we’d be looking at a clip anything from a few seconds up to 2 minutes.
- For art, it needs to be something we can show in a photo, and you may or may not want to write some accompanying text about the artwork.
- If you have another idea, let us know what it might be so we can agree how to fit it into the project.
Alongside your submission, please provide a short sentence to form a little quote that can be easily shared to introduce the submission – (e.g. “Recovery for me means that I can successfully challenge the voice in my head to live the life I choose”).
Please also note:
- Your piece can be made anonymous if you wish, please let us know your preference when contacting us.
- We would not want any mention of specific numbers – weights, calories, amounts eaten, exercise done or length of stay in hospital for example.
- We would want to avoid too much detail about specific eating disorder behaviours.
