2: What Is Recovery? An Autoethnographic Account

This chapter is written from a personal perspective. It uses an approach called autoethnography, which may be new to many readers. The basis of the chapter will be to talk about my own journey of recovery, from being a clinical psychologist and working to develop the approach now known as recovery to my current post as a professor of psychology, still with a great interest in and involvement with the concept of recovery.

After I finished my clinical psychology training at the University of East London, I was unable to get a job in London. I had to move to Kidderminster, just South of Birmingham to work in a district general hospital psychiatric unit as a basic grade psychologist. We never managed to sell our house in London, and after a burst water pipe that flooded the house, we were forced to return to London after only 14 months in the job. I managed to get a job locally at Claybury Hospital in Essex. This was one of two large psychiatric hospitals scheduled for closure. The North-East Thames Regional Health Authority decided that Friern Barnett Hospital and Claybury Hospital would be the first mental hospitals to close. Other mental hospitals like Runwell, Goodmayes, Severalls and Warley would be allowed to stay open, but the direction of travel was clear: they were all going to close in the future. The government had decided that community care was the way forward.