ABSTRACT
This chapter formulates an alternative theoretical framework to address the three research questions. The questions include what are the Chinese mental health service users in the study recovering from and what do they recover into, what hinders and facilitates the recovery process, and in particular how do class, gender, ethnicity and other structural influences intersect to shape outcomes, and what are service users' own assessments of their recovery journeys so far, in terms of the extent to which they consider themselves recovered and their hopes for the future. The chapter argues that the rich data generated by this study reveal the complex and diverse way structural inequalities shape the social conditions in which Chinese service users in the UK recover and the different strategies they use to strive to move from patienthood to personhood. Finally, the chapter ends with a call to put social justice and tackling of social inequalities at the core of recovery agenda.
