Bad Faith, Authenticity and Homecoming in the Recovery from Schizophrenia

There is a growing movement in the UK for the idea of encouraging and trying to empower recovery from mental health conditions as can be seen from the many recovery colleges springing up around the country. Although this is a... [ view full abstract ]

There is a growing movement in the UK for the idea of encouraging and trying to empower recovery from mental health conditions as can be seen from the many recovery colleges springing up around the country. Although this is a developing and active endeavor to help sufferers, which is to be welcomed and is progressing in depth and rigour, there is a lack of literature in the philosophy of psychiatry that deals with the concept of recovery. Although it may seem that recovery is just a matter of arriving at a state where the mental health condition no longer has an influence on the life of the person diagnosed with such a problem, in actuality this is not what the term recovery means in the case of most mental health conditions. It is unlikely in the majority of cases that the sufferer will ever be entirely free of the symptoms of a mental health condition without the aid of medication and there is always the possibility of relapse. ‘Recovery’ must therefore refer to something else rather than complete remission from symptoms. In the first section I elaborate how Sartrean bad faith and authenticity relate to recovery from schizophrenia and then move on to the idea of homecoming. I shall refer to the goal of recovery from mental health conditions as a 'homecoming' (taking Odysseus’s homeward journey in The Odyssey as an example), which refers to a space of sanity, respite from psychosis and a return to the normal ordinary everyday. I shall explore the notion of the various homecomings people might experience in the last section of the paper where I use a poem to help define the goal of recovery from mental health conditions.