Chapter 2

This chapter traces the historical development, conceptual evolution, and ongoing debates surrounding the recovery model in community mental health, placing it within broader struggles for citizenship, social justice, and human rights. Starting with deinstitutionalization and the rise of community-based services, the authors explore how early service models often reinforced maintenance-focused practices and professional pessimism despite increased access to care. Using research, lived-experience narratives, and policy developments, the chapter documents the emergence of recovery as a counter-narrative to chronicity, as conceptualized by Bill Anthony’s influential reframing of recovery as a guiding vision rather than a specific clinical outcome. The chapter critically examines efforts to define, operationalize, and measure recovery, highlighting tensions between subjective lived experience and objective indicators such as symptom remission and social functioning. Special attention is given to critiques from psychiatric survivor movements, which argue that professionalized versions of recovery risk appropriating and diluting its emancipatory roots. The authors promote citizenship as a necessary extension of recovery, emphasizing participation, inclusion, agency, and social belonging as key outcomes of mental health services. Ultimately, the chapter contends that recovery-oriented practice must go beyond individual change to address structural barriers, coercive practices, and social inequalities. Re-centering lived experience, narrative authority, and rights-based frameworks is presented as essential to realizing recovery as both a personal and collective effort.