Psychological Recovery Beyond Mental Illness [Hardcover]

This book offers a succinct model of recovery from serious mental illness, synthesizing stories of lived experience to provide a framework for clinical work and research in the field of recovery.
• Places the process of recovery within the context of normal human growth and development
• Compares and contrasts concepts of recovery from mental illness with the literature on grief, loss and trauma
• Situates recovery within the growing field of positive psychology – focusing on the active, hopeful process
• Describes a consumer-oriented, stage-based model of psychological recovery which is unique in its focus on intrapersonal processesAbout the authors xi

Foreword by Jon Strang xiii

Preface xvii

Acknowledgements xix

Part I Recovery in Historical Context

1 Introduction: Recovery from schizophrenia 3

Overview 3

Early conceptualizations of schizophrenia 4

Diagnostic systems and prognostic pessimism 6

Empirical evidence for recovery 7

The persistence of a pessimistic prognosis 13

The real possibility of recovery 17

The emergence of the ‘recovery’ movement 18

What do we mean by ‘recovery’? 20

Conclusion 22

Summary 22

2 Conceptualizing recovery: A consumer-oriented approach 23

Overview 23

Developing a consumer-oriented model of recovery 24

The search for common ground 25

Meanings of recovery in the literature 25

Consumer descriptions – psychological recovery 28

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