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This article explores recovery within mental health as a journey of healership, one in which we are all engaged in healing our own wounds. It recounts the author's personal journey with the question ‘What is the journey into healership?’ and her research with four co‐researchers who work as recovery guides in a crisis house in North Birmingham. It explores the wider implications for service development and the training of mental health professionals.

The concept of personal recovery is now a key pillar of service delivery. It aims to support individuals to flourish and establish a new identity following an acute episode or diagnosis. This view of recovery is unique to each person on that journey. However, there has been a significant focus on measuring these experiences. This paper aims to explore the influence of social constructionism on the concept of recovery within an Irish context, seeking to understand the influence of language, discourse and power on service users’ experiences.

A qualitative, interpretivist methodology was adopted for this case study design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 service users. Thematic analysis was chosen as the method of analysis.

Personalising recovery did not always lead to the removal of biological symptoms, but with the appropriate supports, individual’s recovery journey was greatly enhanced. On the contrary, personal recovery places overwhelmingly responsibility on the individual to succeed, largely driven by neoliberal discourse. This focus on individualism and the pressure to succeed was further experienced when people sought to re-integrate into society and participate in normalised social order. Ultimately, for many service users, they viewed personal recovery as an unfulfilled promise.

It is not a representative sample of service users within an Irish context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore influence of social constructionism on the concept of personal recovery within a mental health service context.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of the Recovery Rocks Community of peers in recovery.

Description of history of the community.

The community is successful in providing mutual support in members journeys of recovery.

The community exists in Perth, Western Australia.

Similar communities might be developed by groups of peers in other places.

Offers an innovative, peer support community approach to facilitating recovery.

Offers an innovative approach to fostering recovery in a peer support community that could act as a model for the development of other similar communities.

This paper aims to describe the origin, development and increasing application of the Recovery Star within the UK.

The mental health Recovery Star is an holistic and personalised outcomes measurement and recovery‐focused key working tool and it was designed primarily for people of working age. The author describes its origin, development, and increasing application within the UK.

The paper finds that the Recovery Star has been instrumental in promoting social inclusion for many service users, their carers and families.

The paper discusses the Recovery Star as an innovative tool developed by Triangle Consulting and the Mental Health Providers Forum, one which has rapidly established itself as the recovery tool of choice for many service users and providers and fits in well with the personalisation agenda.

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.

This paper aims to describe how a patient centred recovery approach was implemented in a secure learning disabilities service.

There are no specific tools for measuring recovery in a secure learning disabilities service. The Recovery Star; a measure of individual recovery was adopted for use among the patients. Staff underwent training on the use of the Recovery Star tool after which a multidisciplinary steering group made some modifications to the tool. Training was cascaded to staff throughout the service and use of the Recovery Star tool was embedded in the care programme approach process.

It was found that implementing a recovery approach with the Recovery Star tool was a beneficial process for the service but that services will require a whole systems approach to implementing recovery. Key workers working with patients thought that the structure of the Recovery Star tool opened up avenues for discussing topics covered in the domains of the Recovery Star tool which may otherwise have not been discussed as fully.

The availability of a tool, integrated into existing service processes, e.g. care programme approach and accompanied by a systems approach, equips patients and staff for articulating and measuring the recovery journey.

The paper shows that the Recovery Star tool, embedded in a care programme approach process, equips patients and staff for measuring the recovery journey.

The purpose of this paper is to describe Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust's journey of developing more recovery-focused services from two perspectives: that of the Trust project lead for recovery and that of a Recovery College Student and Peer Support Worker.

First person, narrative account from the Trust project lead for recovery and that of a Recovery College Student and Peer Support Worker.

Reflective account describing process and progress made towards establishing a Recovery College and Peer Support Worker Posts in Clinical Teams.

An original viewpoint on the process of developing more recovery-focused services.

This study aims to investigate the process of recovery for people diagnosed with personality disorder. This is related to the application of the new meaning of recovery from mental illness as explored by members of The Haven which, as the service setting for the study, addresses the problems of a client group that suffers significant social exclusion and aims to examine efforts which attempt to reverse this social exclusion.

A participatory action research approach was chosen for this study and The Haven Research Group, comprised of the author and Haven clients, formulated proposed research questions and conducted focus groups and individual client interviews with 66 participants, over a period of three years. The group has been concerned with the effectiveness of The Haven as a recovery tool from the perspective of service users and carers.

An examination of emerging themes, and the interplay between themes, gives insight into what participants considered to be the key steps to recovery for someone with a personality disorder diagnosis. From this thematic analysis, a map is proposed of the journey of recovery for people with the diagnosis.

As an alternative to the historically sequential path of rehabilitation and proposed recovery, this study offers a new, socially inclusive way of working with people who have a personality disorder diagnosis where they may choose to retain a haven while continuing to develop and progress on their chosen path in the wider world.

The Haven has emerged as a unique model where therapeutic community principles have been combined with a crisis unit which shows that it is possible to work effectively with a relatively large number of people with personality disorder, well in excess of 100 at one time, many of whom had not made progress in other service settings, resulting in significant financial savings to the health, social care and criminal justice system.

This study offers contributions to knowledge in terms of the service design and proposes a new model of recovery in personality disorder. This is defined as a journey of small steps highlighting recovery as a process rather than a goal, leading to the emergence of the new concept of transitional recovery.

The purpose of this viewpoint is to discuss a personal account of the author's personal journey of recovery and evolving understanding of recovery.

A personal narrative describing the ways in which the author's understanding of recovery has been challenged and has evolved. Reference to theories of learning is made to understand this process.

That reflection and re-evaluation of long held beliefs is a painful process. It involves not simply adding to existing knowledge but “supplantive learning” – learning as loss: changing how the author sees things having processed new “threshold concepts” (Atherton, 2013b).

A personal account of the painful process of change that has relevance for both people rebuilding their lives with mental health conditions and those who are working with them.

Existing literature has examined what recovery means to people with co-occurring difficulties, but does little to examine experiences of recovery as a process. The purpose of this paper is to use a narrative approach to explore the process of recovery as an individual journey in a social context. It focuses on people who use alcohol in order to explore the impact of alcohol’s specific cultural meanings on the recovery journey.

Ten interviews with people with coexisting mental health and alcohol misuse difficulties were conducted, audio-recorded, and transcribed. The transcriptions were analysed using narrative analysis.

Most participants’ narratives shared a three-part structure, from a traumatic past, through an episode of change, to an ongoing recovery phase. Change and recovery were attributed to several factors including flexible and practical support from services, therapeutic relationships with key professionals, and peer support. Some participants redefined themselves and their alcohol use in relation to ideas of what it is to be “normal”.

The research excluded people who recover outside of services, replicating a shortcoming of much research in this area.

The value placed on professionals having specialised therapeutic skills in working with trauma highlights the need for training in this area. The role for practical and material support underlines the importance of multi-agency working.

The narrative methodology enables the study to draw links between personal stories of recovery and wider social influences, allowing comment on the implications for services. Further, the experiences of people with coexisting mental health and alcohol misuse difficulties have rarely been studied apart from the dual diagnosis population in general, so this paper is able to investigate the specific challenges for this population.