ABSTRACT
Within a recovery model, the currency for measuring the resources available to achieve and sustain change is ‘recovery capital,’ a measure of the personal and social resources available to achieve and sustain change, as part of a strengths-based approach to understanding sustainable change. However, it has been argued that adverse experiences – particularly chronic mental health and serious criminal recidivism – are barriers to change, and constitute ‘negative recovery capital.’ Based on secondary analysis from the Glasgow Recovery Study, and two other studies of pathways to recovery, this chapter examines the impact of prison history on recovery outcomes. The chapter concludes that a ‘better than well’ model of change can explain the ‘rebound effect’ from serious adverse life events, and embeds this within a social identity model of recovery transformation.
