Recovery and the Good Life: How Psychiatric Survivors Are Revisioning the Healing Process

Abstract

The recovery literature in clinical psychology often focuses on abstract outcome measures of mental health and wellness that in turn serve to shape the process and goals of psychotherapy. However, there is often an experiential disconnect between these conceptualizations of recovery and the lived experience of psychological suffering and healing. In the current article, the authors present alternative views of what recovery or, more accurately, what living a good life means for a group of people who identify themselves as psychiatric survivors. Like the feminist paradigm, the psychiatric survivor movement does not separate the personal and political, and thus this counterculture facilitates the telling of alternative narratives of recovery that more closely represent people's lived experiences. The authors discuss how these alternative discourses of the movement conceptualize the good life in terms of creating countercultural communities, engaging in political activism, and working for social justice and human rights in the mental health system.