Flawed, but nonetheless important critique of recovery becoming compliance.....
Who could be against recovery? The emphasis on hope is something with which I have no quarrel, having once been told that I had none. But the recovery movement interprets this in a particular way and it is with an ideological slant that will reappear throughout this editorial. Consider a piece of research, a collaboration with service user researchers (Crawford et al., 2011). This was a nominal group study seeking to find out how service users, with either a diagnosis of psychosis or affective problems, ranked outcome measures commonly used in trials.
Here, I will consider the group with a diagnosis of psychosis. Their top-ranked outcome measure was of side-effects of medication: this is what mattered most to them in terms of the outcomes of interventions. The Recovery Star ranked in the middle. Service users were critical of measures of function, pointing out that not socialising with others or breaking connections with families was not necessarily dysfunctional but a way of protecting one’s mental health. My point is that such aspirations are not absent from the recovery movement and associated measures. For all that goals are meant to be “personal”, certain goals are not permitted. You can not decide to go to bed for a month.