It is only in the past 20 years that the concept of 'recovery' from mental health has been more widely considered and researched. Before then, it was generally considered that 'stability' was the best that anyone suffering from a mental disorder could hope for.

Introduction / Abraham Rudnick -- Section. 1. First-person accounts in relation to recovery -- Life beyond psychiatry / Wilma Boevink -- A wellness approach to mental health recovery / Margaret Swarbrick -- Families and patients with mental illness : on the recovery road / Eliahu Shamir -- Section 2. Historical, epistemological, and metaphysical aspects of recovery of people with mental illness -- Benevolence and discipline : the concept of recovery in early nineteenth-century moral treatment / Louis C. Charland -- The epistemological basis of personal recovery / Mike Slade -- Contrasting conceptualizations of recovery imply a distinct research methodology / Kenneth Gill -- Cultural contexts and constructions of recovery / Ademola Adeponle, Rob Whitley, Laurence J. Kirmayer -- Recovery and hope in relation to schizophrenia / Beate Schrank, Johannes Wally, Burghart Schmidt -- Recovery, narrative theory, and generative madness / Bradley Lewis -- From being subjected to being a subject : recovery in relation to schizophrenia / Paul Lysaker, John Lysaker -- Section 3. Justice and other ethical aspects of recovery of people with mental illness -- Some social science antinomies and their implications for the recovery-oriented approach to mental illness and psychiatric rehabilitation / Shlomo Kravetz, Ilanit Hasson-Ohayon -- Recovery and the partitioning of scientific authority in psychiatry / Douglas Porter, Peter Zachar -- Being ill and getting better : recovery and accounts of disorder / Rachel Cooper -- Is recovery a model? / Tim Thornton -- Considering recovery as a process : or, life is not an outcome / Larry Davidson -- Recovery and stigma : issues of social justice / Elizabeth Flanagan, Dror Ben Zeev, Patrick Corrigan -- Recovery and advocacy : contextualizing justice in relation to recovery from mental illness in East Asia / Marcus Yu-Lung Chiu -- Ethical and related practical issues faced by recovery-oriented mental healthcare providers : a risk-benefit analysis / Abraham Rudnick.