ABSTRACT

This chapter illuminates how the participants made sense of the direction in which their lives were travelling. Hope has been discussed as a psychological capability that stimulates recovery and personal change to counteract hopelessness and pessimism. Sanism operated at a structural level in limiting participants' life chances in pursuing a valued life. The effect of sanism was experienced as an invalidation at the social-existential level. Ignorance, prejudice and discrimination are barriers to participants trying to convert their social capital into capabilities. Invalidation does not only happen because of visible differences. Participants found maintaining social relationships difficult. The ways participants used illness identity, disabled identity and service user identity as responses to the invalidation they experienced could be considered as an adaptation. Participants did not only form and draw on illness, disabled and service user identities as strategies against invalidation and reassessing their future. A recovery journey is an ongoing process.