Recovery: experiences of resistance to disablism?

Abstract

This article explores whether it is fruitful to use a service user/survivor approach to recovery, by seeing recovery as survival of social invalidation. That is survival of the psychosocial forces that were the source of the experience of mental distress, and as survival of social oppression by the psychiatric services and/or wider society. It could be argued that the participants in this study in the United Kingdom and Sweden recovered, and reclaimed and (re)constructed positive identities. They actively resisted experiences of disablism and rebuilt their lives. By approaching recovery from a service user/survivor perspective, one is focusing on the social, structural and political aspects of the recovery process, and one is resisting biomedical, deviant and reductionist notions of recovery.

Keywords:

• Recovery
• oppression
• identity
• mental distress
• disablism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all of the participants who agreed to take part in this study – without their willingness and their trust with their stories, this research would not have been possible.