Recovery: The Outcome
Recovery may seem like an illusory concept. We still know very little about what this process is like for people with severe mental illness. Yet many recent intervention studies have in fact measured elements of recovery, even though the recovery process went unmentioned. Recovery is a multidimensional concept: there is no single measure of recovery, but many different measures that estimate various aspects of it. The recovery vision expands our concept of service outcome to include such dimensions as self-esteem, adjustment to disability, empowerment, and self-determination. However, it is the concept of recovery, and not the many ways to measure it, that ties the various components of the field into a single vision. For service providers, recovery from mental illness is a vision commensurate with researchers’ vision of curing and preventing mental illness. Recovery is a simple yet powerful vision (Anthony, 1991).
Recovery may seem like an illusory concept. We still know very little about what this process is like for people with severe mental illness. Yet many recent intervention studies have in fact measured elements of recovery, even though the recovery process went unmentioned. Recovery is a multidimensional concept: there is no single measure of recovery, but many different measures that estimate various aspects of it. The recovery vision expands our concept of service outcome to include such dimensions as self-esteem, adjustment to disability, empowerment, and self-determination. However, it is the concept of recovery, and not the many ways to measure it, that ties the various components of the field into a single vision. For service providers, recovery from mental illness is a vision commensurate with researchers’ vision of curing and preventing mental illness. Recovery is a simple yet powerful vision (Anthony, 1991).
