ABSTRACT
This chapter privileges the collective lived experience body of knowledge about recovery. It assumes that this emergent body of knowledge provides important concepts and framework for understanding processes of recovery and the conditions likely to facilitate it. For a recovery agenda to be genuine, embedded and enduring, some traditional attitudes, practices and ideologies need to be jettisoned, while past practices and current power structures need to be critiqued. From a medical perspective, optimism about the prospect of whether or not madness can be ‘cured’ or whether the ‘insane’ can recover has waxed and waned. The tradition of mutual self-help is underpinned by the idea that working for the recovery of others facilitates personal recovery, and in helping oneself, one helps others. In United States, ‘rehabilitation’ sector proved to be fertile ground for development and testing of recovery approaches and promulgation of idea that people can and do experience periods of crisis and distress while also living enriched and contributing lives.
