The Genealogy of Mutual Recovery

The notion of recovery has become prominent in mental health care discourse in the UK, but it is often considered as if it were a relatively novel notion, and as if it represented an alternative to conventional treatment and intervention. A part of the task of this work package is to explore some of the origins of the notion of recovery in the early 20th century in movements such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Recovery Inc. Whilst these phenomena are not exactly continuous with recovery in the present day, some important antecedents of the contemporary notion can be detected. These include the focus on the sufferers’ interior space as a key theatre of operations and the reinforcement and consolidation of medical ways of seeing the condition without any immediate medical supervision of the actors being necessary. This has resonance with many contemporary examples of recovery in practice where the art of living with a mental health condition is emphasised without the nature of the psychopathological condition itself being challenged.

The project will also explore critically the concept of mutuality in mental health care, which is associated with the idea that clients and practitioners might benefit from a relationship which is reciprocal, involving and co-productive. This is a pervasive idea in mental health care yet as authors with a philosophical bent such as Martin Buber have pointed out it can be difficult to achieve in practice. Here it is argued that it is best understood in terms of social capital for both social capital and mutuality can be understood in terms of social relationships and networks. Mutuality and interpersonal support have been advocated and shown to be effective in a good deal of work on peer support programmes for sufferers from mental health problems and informal carers. However, mutuality may be restricted by institutional arrangements, concerns about professional boundaries and national policies which foreground a paternalistic model of services. Therefore mutuality can be enhanced through a critical awareness of how power relationships shape the experience. Hence, the more sociologically nuanced account of mutuality advanced here can be helpful as it sensitises us to questions of power and domination as well as enabling us to see mutuality in terms of networks of relationships and resources instead of merely an interpersonal phenomenon.