Resilience and Resistance on the Road to Recovery in Mental Health

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between policy discourses framed around notions of resilience, the influence of the mental health user movement, and the institutionalisation of the recovery model in mental health programmes. This has particular relevance for community education practice. It argues that a spurious consensus has been constructed which conceals competing interests, contested meanings and contentious politics.  It concludes by considering what hope there is for reclaiming recovery as a social and political practice which is capable of resisting those neoliberal austerity agendas through which it is currently constructed. Although it is written from the Scottish context, it will certainly have relevance elsewhere.