In contrast to the Rehabilitation View of Recovery, people who have recovered from mental illness have an empowering view that full recovery is possible for everybody. According to this Empowerment Vision, people are labeled with mental illness through a combination of severe emotional distress and insufficient social supports/resources/coping skills to maintain the major social role expected of them during that phase in their life. The psychosocial nature of mental illness is highlighted by the common experience most consumer/survivors have gone through of having had a variety of diagnoses. In fact, the degree of interruption in a person's social role is more important in affixing the label mental illness to someone than their diagnosis. Recovery is possible through a combination of supports needed to (re)establish a major social role and the self-management skills needed to take control of the major decisions affecting one. This combination of social supports and self-management help the person regain membership in society and regain the sense of being a whole person. Self-help and peer support are fundamental elements in this journey of recovery because often the only people who can truly understand the feeling of exclusion are those who have also been labeled. http://www.power2u.org/articles/reco...ew_vision.html

As I've learned, both professionally and personally, social context is critical to recovery. In other words, there's invariably a social reason to get better. This is what has been largely overlooked by the "medical model" of treatment, which proposes that you must stabilize a person with treatment (typically drugs) before they can be put back in their social roles or environment.

Larry Davidson, a Yale researcher on recovery from severe mental illness, has examined the data and found that this model is flawed, at least in the field of mental health. "In the medical model, you take a person with a mental illness, you provide treatment in the hopes of reducing symptoms, and then they're supposed to approximate some notion of normality," he told me. "Our research shows the opposite. You take a person with a mental illness, you then reduce the discrimination and stigma against them, increase their social roles and participation, which provides them a reason to get better in the first place, and then you provide treatment and support. The issue is not so much making them normal but helping them get their lives back." http://www.mindlink.org/healing_a_troubled_mind.html