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Hello once more teejai:
I thought the following excerpt was also appropriate for this topic because it refines even further the definition of recovery. Those of you who are familiar with the article are welcome to skip the link. Those of you who have never read it may find it insightful.

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I have entitled this presentation, "Long Term Outcome for Rehabiliated Psychiatric Patients: Reasons for Optimism". The plan this morning is to look at recovery and the evidence for it among people with very serious mental illness. Let us look at some things that we've learned about rehabilitation and also a little bit about resilience. I'm going to present seven of the ten world studies this morning.

Now, <font color=#DC143C>when we talk about subjects who are recovered, we're talking about no medications, no symptoms, being able to work, relating to other people well, living in the community, and behaving in a way that you would never know that they had had a serious psychiatric disorder</font>. And if you have heard of that old belief that one third get better, one third get worse, and one third stay the same, we found that it was not true. In the Vermont Longtitudinal Study, we took the bottom third of this population and found that two-thirds of them also turned around...

-- Dr. Courtenay Harding

Source: <a href=http://spiritualrecoveries.blogspot.com/2007/01/myth-busting-schizophrenia-is-incurable.html>The Recovery Vision</a>