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The purpose of this paper is to provide a profile of Jana Rozenhalova.

Jana provides a short summary of her life and is then interviewed by Jerome.

Jana tells us about her long struggles with eating disorders and provides us with the metaphor that it is like being a broken cup glued back together again. You have to be very careful it does not break again.

Jana’s story is one, yet it offers us unique insights. She comments at one point, “[…] if it was not for the eating disorders […] I would not be me”.

Jana notes that while she could see many reasons behind her eating disorders, they did not really matter. What mattered was that she could overcome them.

While Jana first thought hope was an empty word, she now realises in retrospect that she was more hopeful than anyone she knew. As Patricia Deegan (1996) puts it, “Hope is not just a nice sounding euphemism. Hope and biological life are inextricably intertwined” (p. 93).

Jana concludes her account saying she would like to be able to look back at her life and feel that she had lived up to her potential. Most of us would also be happy with that outcome.

The purpose of this paper is to review the 20 remarkable lives of student accounts published in this journal. These recovery narratives (RNs) are examined first in terms of whether they meet the five elements of the connectedness, hope, identity, meaning and empowerment (CHIME) model of recovery and then in terms of what makes each account remarkable.

Two Excel spreadsheets were created. One had each author’s name and the five elements of the CHIME model, the other the features of a remarkable life.

All 20 accounts fulfilled the criteria for the CHIME model, independently validating this model of recovery. Hence, each account showed evidence of connectedness, hope, identity, meaning and empowerment. A number of additional characteristics stood out from the accounts such as the importance of motherhood and of education.

All 20 accounts were only reviewed by the two authors, who may be subject to bias. To reduce this, the first author did the bulk of the ratings. This paper shows the importance of education for recovery.

Some 15/20 accounts reported problems with mental health services, mainly around waiting lists. Must mental health always remain a Cinderella service?

This is the first attempt to synthesise this particular set of recovery narratives, entitled remarkable lives. These accounts show the richness of the recovery journeys embarked on by many sufferers and these are just drawn from one University. Like the authors of these stories, we too as recovery specialists have much to learn from their inspiring accounts.