ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to define what mean by recovery following a first episode of psychosis, reflecting on concepts such as symptomatic recovery, functional recovery, social recovery and ‘clinical recovery’, and what truly mean by ‘full’ recovery. Recovery from mental health problems and, in particular, psychosis and schizophrenia, remains an appealing ideal. Unfortunately, despite a large and growing literature and adoption into mainstream thinking, are no nearer a universal definition of what recovery from psychosis actually means, how should measure it and how useful it is for patients, families, services and policy-makers. Symptomatic recovery refers to the reduction, amelioration and/or remission of positive psychotic symptoms and negative symptoms. For many years there was poor agreement as to how symptomatic recovery should be measured and the threshold criteria for when it had been achieved. Social recovery, even more than symptomatic recovery, has suffered from vague and poorly defined outcome criteria.
