ABSTRACT
Social inclusion, involvement and integration into mainstream community life have long been recognised as essential to the maintenance of mental health and key ingredients of recovery. Many prominent psychiatrists, such as William Anthony (1993) and Arthur Kleinman (Patel and Kleinman 2003), have identified poverty as a significant social determinant of mental health and suggest that ongoing poverty, coupled with low levels of education, mitigate against recovery. While recovery began with a time of healing spent in the weekly meeting of GROW and was nurtured through widening involvements in the larger GROW community, participants all agreed that recovery was greatly enhanced by increased participation in society. People's accounts provided concrete examples of their increasing involvement in work, education and leisure activities, which represented another phase in their healing and recovery and the beginning of full citizenship.
