Uncovering Recovery: The Resistible Rise of Recovery and Resilience

Abstract

People who experience psychological distress also experience social injustice. This injustice impacts upon their social, economic and political lives. For example, the social patterning of distress reflects broader social inequalities (Mirowsky & Ross, 2003) as does people’s experience of mental health services (Rogers & Pilgrim, 2003; Pilgrim, 2009). Furthermore, the acquisition of psychiatric diagnoses may also present barriers to full-time employment, or create barriers to housing (Social Exclusion Unit, 2004). These barriers to full social, political and economic participation can be characterized as a problem of redistributive justice (Fraser, 2000). Mental health service users and survivors also experience devalued identities through the acquisition of psychiatric diagnoses. Fraser (2000) identifies this as a problem of recognition, whereby a normatively framed ‘negative’ aspect of identity stigmatizes a particular group. One of the sources of such devaluation is the way in which psychiatric terminology is deficit-laden and pathologizing (e.g. Gergen, 1990). However, in recent years, the popular and professional literature has become increasingly dominated by concepts that appear to reject a deficit-based approach. In this chapter we focus on two of these concepts in more detail: recovery and resilience. We consider the possibilities these concepts offer people in the mental health field, in particular, in terms of struggles around the politics of recognition and redistribution. We provide a perspective from the UK, where the recovery approach has been gradually appearing in mental health policy over the last decade (Perkins and Slade, 2012).