‘Recovery’ is the name of a recent approach to mental healthcare in a growing number of countries within the EU and outside (e.g. The UK and Eire; New Zealand, Australia and the USA). The UK government’s recent policy document ‘No health without mental health’ stresses the role of recovery more broadly. But argues that it has a specific meaning in mental health: ‘A deeply personal, unique process of changing one’s attitudes, values, feelings, goals, skills and/or roles. It is a way of living a satisfying, hopeful and contributing life, even with limitations caused by the illness. Recovery involves the development of new meaning and purpose in one’s life’ (Department of Health 2011).
Whilst suggestive, such a definition is, however, vague and open-ended. Even advocates of the recovery approach to mental healthcare admit that there is a lack of clarity about its status. ‘The term ‘recovery’ appears to have a simple and self-evident meaning, but within the recovery literature it has been variously used to mean an approach, a model, a philosophy, a paradigm, a movement, a vision and, sceptically, a myth’ [Roberts and Wolfson 2004: 38].
Ambiguity and disagreement about the meaning of ‘recovery’ undermine efforts to debate its status as a worthwhile aim and to assess whether policies genuinely promote it. Furthermore, there is anecdotal evidence that the lack of clarity allows mere lip service to be played to implementing recovery focussed models of mental healthcare.
Ambiguous though the recovery model is, there are some key elements that are agreed. Recovery places service users, their values and measures to support and underpin their agency and conception of their own wellbeing at the heart of mental healthcare decision-making. It is thus particularly important that service user researchers should play a role in investigating both descriptive but, more importantly, normative questions about what it is and how it should be pursued. This is the higher order question of how service user researchers can best be supported to carry out and guide research.