“Tell me how it is evaluated, and i will tell you what it is”: what recovery evaluation is adding to the understanding of recovery

Abstract

The concept of “recovery” is still controversial as to what its principal components/dimensions are. From the perspective of a mental health professional, recovery is related to a clinical improvement and to a higher functioning. However, from a users’ perspective, its major component is related to hope and having a meaningful life. The present paper analyses recovery by studying English and Spanish scales designed to measure recovery. A total of 44 recovery scales were found, of which only 19 had been made public, evaluated personal recovery from a users’ perspective, used a Likert scale for all items and could be adapted to different contexts. The existential dimension (i.e., hope, self-esteem) was addressed by 84% of scales, but only 47% of scales had items tapping on social functioning (i.e., daily life activities). A broad dimension related to general aspects of health, illness management and seeking for treatment, named as “health-sickness continuous”, was addressed by 63% of the scales. A final category of social and family relationships (including connectedness) was addressed by 58% of scales. According to our findings, scales evaluating personal recovery are organized in terms of privileging a vision of recovery centered on hope over symptomatology or social functioning, posing a severe challenge to articulating results obtained from recovery scales, with other professional instruments used for mental health evaluation.