How “Recovery” Evolved from Grassroots Movement to Buzzword

Carl I. Cohen's recent article explores how neoliberalism has distorted the recovery movement philosophy in mental health.

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In the mid-20th century, a radical recovery movement emerged, championing the rights of those diagnosed with mental illness to self-determination and meaningful lives. But by the 1990s, this vision was co-opted and diluted by the rise of neoliberalism.

SUNY Downstate psychiatrist Carl I. Cohen’s recent article in Community Mental Health details how neoliberalism has distorted the recovery philosophy, stripping it of its original social justice focus. As mental health professionals increasingly embraced the movement in the 1990s, its message became entangled with the dominant biomedical model and neoliberal values. Cohen argues that this shift has undermined the movement’s potential for transformative change, highlighting the urgent need to address broader social structures that impact mental health.

He writes:

“The potentially radical and transformative vision of the early recovery movement, particularly as envisioned by those in the ex-patient movement, has been largely eviscerated by contemporary ‘neorecovery’s’ disregard for the broader social structures in which people are embedded.”

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4 COMMENTS

  1. Any talk of mental illness or addiction recovery as a movement is an utter violence to each one of us. We are talking about the real world traumas of an unjust, brutal and violent social and pscyhological reality that is itself going mad and plunging off the edge of the cliff, and you want to section and label the species of psychological, emotional, neurological and biological harm of this intrinsically meaningless and all consuming, all destroying process of civilization and apply institutional group-think remedies to an infinitely complex biological, neurological and psychological substrata that is the very mother of all our words and theories which cannot themselves hope to probe the natural, dark and wordless substratas that mysteriously produced them.

    I promise you hand on heart that I do not exaggerate what I say and mean it with the deepest sincerity and with absolute conviction the following. I promise you that you live in an entirely fictional, neutralized, anaesthetized, blinding delusional reality we call normality. It is so profoundly misrepresentative of what actually is because your perception has essentially been socially conditioned into a world where everything is divided although functionally and actually it is all one. I used to live this miserable, specular, meaningless psuedo-reality that ALL OF YOU TODAY STILL LIVE IN, one where all the life has drained into a glacial dullness of perception which is peppered and bullied and distorted by compulsive and bullying and meaningless patterns of thought that the brain deludedly think is ‘me’ when it only ever says ‘me’ – it is nothing but thought. And I moved out of your insane reality into sanity through what the insane society calls a psychosis. It is natures healing remedy that radicalizes our consciousness and our brains if we understand and allow it. It overturns the policeman in your head and stops you being an automaton, a thought-controlled computer brained production line human being. It’s fine to be a machine if you’re a love machine, but love is creative and free. It’s terrible to be a machine if you’re controlled by a machine that invents along old lines and is not creative or free.

    But my words also anaesthetize: in times of such profound, ubiquitous spiritual disease, squalor and horror, as far as normal use of language is concerned “only exaggeration is true”. The full magnitude and horror is only in the seeing, and then what you see is too awful to ever hope to convey in words. It is the only perception that can truly awaken and liberate when you are deeply asleep in illusion, the only perception with enough energy to blow your straight jacket world appart.

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    • Is mental illness a learned reaction to an insane world?

      No. Normality is the learned reaction to an insane world and to the insanity buried in the psyche. Mental illness is a failure of the maturation process — in fact the process is thrown into reverse.

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      • But normality itself is part of this insane world! Normality IS this insane world! That is such an obvious and patent fact, and you’re blaming it on the complex neurology and physiology involved in the flowering of a human being, which is nature’s process. You blame that rather then the insane reality and normality that is OBVIOUSLY, OBVIOUSLY destroying the WHOLE WORLD AND HUMANITY AND EACH ONE OF US INDIVIDUALLY, because these are not three things but one thing. I am a human being which IS humanity and IS the world it created for itself. It is one total structure and it is collapsing from it’s core, it’s core being YOU AND ME and all those who are damaged and sloughed off as mentally ill by this cruel and indifferent world. “Watch this cruel world slough off a sticky life”. I am quoting from the author who used to live in this brain.

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