Recovery and rehabilitation in mental health: Historical perspectives

Recovery and rehabilitation are highly charged terms in contemporary mental health, with their meanings and implications contested by professionals and survivors alike. A loose ‘recovery movement’ with radical reformist aims, which emerged across Britain and the United States in the later decades of the 20th century, has, some argue, been co-opted by ‘neoliberal’ political and clinical interests. Most of these narratives begin with the emergence of the recovery movement as a result of service-user/peer activism in the 1970s: few consider the longer history of ideas and practices of recovery and rehabilitation. In turn, recovery and rehabilitation have been strangely marginal in the works of historians of psychiatry, madness, and mental health. This article traces some of the key literatures and concepts in relation to recovery and rehabilitation, and introduces this special issue of History of the Human Sciences, with contributions on Britain and the United States from the late 19th century to the turn of the 21st century.