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Temporalities of mental health recovery

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Abstract

Since the 1990s, the concept of ‘recovery in/from serious mental health problems’ has been iterated internationally as the new paradigm in mental health policy and practice. A constitutive element of recovery discourse is a struggle over what defines a ‘good’ life-in-time; yet temporalities of recovery remain under-investigated. This article offers an empirical exploration of recovery enacted in an NHS ‘arts for mental health’ service called Create. I present an analysis of several intersecting temporalities at play within Create through the lens of one service-user’s story. The temporal orderings of the situated aesthetic care practices at Create encapsulate competing articulations of recovery, hope and aspiration. These different temporalities enact different subjectivities, revealing recovery to be a set of socio-political struggles over what lives are deemed liveable in the context of global neo-liberal capitalism.

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Notes

  1. Research in this area shows that the history of recovery is much longer than its use by mental health activists from 1970s onwards (see, for example, Jacobson, 2004). However, in its current iteration its activist origin is the story most often told.

  2. All names are pseudonyms and some details have been changed to preserve research participant anonymity.

  3. The exact details of this separation were not covered during our interviews; however, it is clear that it was not a separation that they chose.

  4. Hearing voices is not universally a distressing and debilitating experience for everyone, as co-founders of the Hearing Voices Network, Patsy Hage, Marius Romme and Sandra Escher, found in their research (Hornstein, 2009).

  5. This is one reading of diagnosis as a singular, decisive and universally violent act. However, other people have sought a diagnosis in order that they might access services and make sense of their experiences.

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the staff and service users of Create who participated in the research (funded by the ESRC – Ref: ES/G018529/1). The author also thanks Imogen Tyler, Celia Roberts, Vicky Singleton, Helen Spandler, Monica Greco, Nat Gill and Maureen McNeil for their valuable feedback, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Bowland North, Lancaster, LA1 4YT, Lancashire, UK

    Brigit McWade

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McWade, B. Temporalities of mental health recovery. Subjectivity 8, 243–260 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.8

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