Community Mental Health Journal - Call for Papers: Recovery at 30: Emancipation, cooptation, or the end of an era?

Guest Editors: 
Vandana Gopikumar, PhD & Archana Padmakar, PhD (Banyan Academy for Leadership in Mental Health); Ro Speight (New York State Psychiatric Institute);  Nev Jones (University of Pittsburgh); Rebecca Miller (Yale University) & Sandy Steingard (Editor In Chief, Community Mental Health Journal)

Submission Deadline: December 1, 2023

The year 2023 marks exactly three decades since the publication of Bill Anthony’s seminal “Recovery from mental illness: the guiding vision of the mental health service system in the 1990s.” Originally put forward as an emancipatory alternative to then-standard prognostic pessimism and interventions premised on de facto segregation and/or institutionalization, in recent years recovery discourse has come under increasing critique from service user activists (e.g. Recovery in the Bin), critical scholars (e.g. Harper & Speed, 2014; Woods et al., 2020) and global mental health and cultural studies researchers (e.g. Bayetti et al., 2017; Bhatia & Priya, 2018). 

Articulated concerns are diverse, but include charges that recovery discourse has played into the hands of neoliberal welfare reform and austerity and conservative libertarian-leaning theories of governance; that it is fundamentally premised on Anglophone, culture-bound assumptions regarding the nature of self, other and healing; that it has been swiftly coopted by traditional authorities and deployed to maintain rather than transform the subjugated status of service recipients; and that it tends to reinforce rather than critically deconstruct ableism (and the marginalized status of disabled persons).

In this special issue of Community Mental Health Journal, we are soliciting both concept pieces (commentaries, critical reviews) and empirical work (qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic or mixed methods) that explore the question of whether recovery policy remains relevant and emancipatory today or whether the psy-fields are instead in need of fresh thinking and new, more diverse values-based frameworks.  In particular we encourage:

• Submissions from authors/teams based in the Global South and/or who identify as members of culturally and racially minoritized groups in the Global North;
• Service users, survivors and activists, both with and without formal academic backgrounds and affiliations;
• Ethnographically informed work, in particular work that calls attention to discrepancies between clinical rhetoric and the realities of clinics, prisons, communities and the streets;
• Critical reflections from senior figures in the field, who have witness both the birth of the recovery movement and its evolution in recent years;
• Pieces focused on the relationship between recovery discourse/policy and social and structural determinants/structural violence; 
• Planned debates or dialogues (structured as single submissions or companion pieces) that showcase thoughtful discussion of different opinions and perspectives on a target issue/area (within broader recovery discourse)

Please route inquiries regarding submissions from or focused on the Global South to Drs. Gopikumar (this opens in a new tab) and Padmakar (this opens in a new tab), and inquiries regarding submissions from or focused on the Global North to Dr. Jones (this opens in a new tab).