Promoting recovery in England

This chapter examines the political rationalities, expertise, and techniques of government involved in the emergence of mental recovery in England as a field of more or – very often – less systematic political intervention. Like in many other liberal democracies, the treatment of the mentally ill in England has undergone a substantial transformation from an approach in which relatively narrow biomedical interventions were employed in large-scale mental institutions to so-called community-based care. Our overall argument in this chapter is that recovery is a power-laden practice that works above all through nurturing and structuring the self-steering capacities – the freedom – of the mentally ill. While we strongly sympathise with those that celebrate the emancipatory potential of the de-institutionalisation of the treatment of mental illness, we are also concerned with the new kind of power engrained in the recovery approach.