What is it about?
This piece is about reimagining psychiatric care through Radical Recovery. It argues that mental health systems cannot simply ask patients, families, staff, and communities to trust them. They have to become trustworthy. That means acknowledging where psychiatry has caused harm or failed people, listening seriously to lived experience, sharing power with patients and families, and designing care around dignity, agency, belonging, and healing.
Featured Image
Photo by Ronda Dorsey on Unsplash
Why is it important?
How do we make psychiatric care feel less like something done to people, and more like something built with people? Its central message is that the future of psychiatry depends on more than better treatments. It depends on repairing relationships, changing institutional behavior, and creating systems where people feel seen, respected, and genuinely helped.
Perspectives
I wrote this piece because I believe trust cannot be demanded or assumed. As I note in the piece, “Trust is a downstream indicator.” It follows visible accountability, sustained results, and the courage to confront the harms our field has caused. At the Institute of Living at Hartford HealthCare our Radical Recovery vision offers one possible blueprint for this work. It centers community, choice, and cocreated care. It brings people with lived and living experience into shared governance. It expands supported decision making, partners with peer specialists and family advocates, and ties promises of change to observable shifts in practice.
Javeed Sukhera
Hartford HealthCare
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Radical Recovery as a Blueprint for Rebuilding Trust, Psychiatric Services, May 2026, American Psychiatric Association,
DOI: 10.1176/appi.ps.20250650.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
