Recovery: experiences of resistance to disablism

• 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 opression 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 serivce 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.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialt arbete (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Work (hsv//eng)

Keyword

recovery

oppression

identity

mental distress

disablism

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)