The Genealogy of Mutual Recovery

This work package will enable us to gain some critical purchase on the notion of mutual recovery. The idea of genealogy in the humanities and social sciences is that in order to understand concepts and practices one needs to understand their history, how they were devised and for what purpose, and understand the struggles and debates which led to them taking their present form.

Accordingly, this work package will examine the genealogy, theories and conceptualisation of key issues in the creative practice as mutual recovery programme, such as recovery and mutuality themselves. We will examine what definitions, concepts and utility can apply to the term ‘mutual recovery, the genealogy, theories and conceptualisation of creative practice as mutual recovery, the nature, shape and form of communities and how they are thought of and how they might be connected for mental health and well-being. This work package will provide a critical baseline of how the notions of ‘recovery’ and ‘mutual recovery’ are formulated in particular communities and assist in engaging with and managing sometimes conflicting and strongly embedded, professional and community cultures. This will involve tracing the relationship of the recovery movement to the rise of the user movement and other movements in radical psychiatry. It will also analyse how notions of community and mutual recovery are understood within biomedicine in relation to specific mental health disorders (antisocial personality disorder, depression, schizophrenia), and how mutual recovery is being (re)framed in organic as well as psychosocial terms and is changing how we conceptualise individuals and communities.

Project Start Date: Wednesday 1st January 2014 Project End Date: Saturday 31st December 2016

Brian Brown
School of Applied Social Sciences,
De Montfort University,
Leicester LE1 9BH
brown@brown.uk.com