The recovered subject. A socio-cognitive snapshot of a new subject in the field of mental health

Abstract: Recovery represents a new paradigm in the field of mental health. It refers hereby less to the possibility of relief from symptoms than to the indi8vidual's capacity to develop a meaningful life and a self-concept beyond the illness. Several countries adopted recovery-oriented approaches to implement mental health service reforms and attracted considerable scientific interest on that subject matter. A comprehensive theory of the recovery process is however still missing. The present article argues for an analytic approach to the socio-cognitive components in the different stages of the subject's recovery process. By the means of narratives from mental health patients, a dramatic loss of internal territoriality ("locus") is evidenced in psychiatric treatment, whereby a subject in crisis renounces its internality to the professionals' authority. The eventual process of a subject's recovery, we suggest, has to be regarded as an inverse process, in which internality is privately and socially reclaimed and defended in terms of ownership and responsibility. The phenomenon of users' social movements, such as Madpride, is suggested as a form of re-conquest of social territory by the means of emancipatory pride. The mental components of the recovery process represent, in a large part, concepts from the theoretic framework of Cristiano Castelfranchi and his associates. A conception of the subject emerges whereby recovery is ideated literally as a process of "re-covering" aka protecting the subject's internality against the psychiatric/institutional gaze and rule of private a?airs.