Concepts of recovery: competing or complementary?

Within the last 5 years, concepts of recovery have taken center stage in psychiatry as the overarching goal of mental health services. In the course of this shift towards recovery, clinicians and consumers (and many others) have struggled to make the concept of recovery both measurable and meaningful. The clinical concept of recovery has focused upon the remission of symptoms and restoration of functioning. A rehabilitation model of recovery has been a more subjective and consumer-oriented concept that focuses on the full lives that are lived within the context of enduring disability.

A review of the literature addressing the concepts of recovery over the last 2 years demonstrates that authors are rarely explicit about the perspective of recovery from which they are writing. Almost all of the representative papers, however, struggled with how best to define, measure and validate recovery in its broadest terms. Several authors reviewed the history of recovery and offered conceptual discussions of either their first-person experiences or implications for mental health practice. Other authors, regardless of their perspective on recovery, sought to more concretely define criteria for recovery, for the purposes of recovery measure development or more rigorous research of the concept.

As authors struggle to reconcile these often competing concepts of recovery, we suggest that both concepts are useful for different purposes and populations and that the synthesis of the two will offer a broader perspective on life with, after, or despite mental illness.