Recovery 0.0.
In the Netherlands, as in other countries, the concept of recovery was discovered as a promising perspective within the psychiatric user movement. During the first ten years (> 1995) users of long-term psychiatric services came together throughout the country to give meaning to the recovery concept themselves. Care providers and so-called ‘main stream’ parties in the psychiatric field mainly were focused on other ‘business’. For users of psychiatric services the recovery concept is about hope and explicitly not about clinical outcome indicators as ‘symptom-free’, ‘cure’ or ‘therapy-resistant’. Recovery is ‘becoming who you are’, about finding personal ways of living with your vulnerabilies, about formulating your personal indicators of a good live. To learn to know yourself as a person means growing beyond viewing yourself as a psychiatric patient from the bio-medical point of view, thus leaving behind the conviction that you are in the left-over group of non-cureable patients, either with therapy resistant disorders or lack of ‘will’ to get cured. From the recovery movement a new dialogue was developed: in the first place among psychiatric users themselves. Main questions to be answered became: what are the obstacles in your life and how should you deal with them? What do you want to do with your life and what care and support do you  need to make that possible? The primairy aim of psychiatric care should be to enable its users to lead their lives in the manner they wish. Care is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The growing self-empowerment of persons suffering with severe mental issues also made an new dialogue possible between them and professionals working in psychiatry. No longer professionals talking about patients without them, but a more equal exchange of experiences and about how recovery processes can best be supported. Experiential expertise became an additional kind of knowledge source in innovations in psychiatry, next to scientific and professional knowledge.

Recovery 1.0.

Nobody owns concepts. However, when the concept was discovered by main stream psychiatry, slowly but surely the concept was influenced by the bio-medical perspective. Psychiatry claimed the concept and integrated it into their vocabular and their system. What was called earlier ‘symptom reduction’ (through the use of pharmaceutics) became clinical recovery. Revalidation is now called function recovery and rehabilitation became societal recovery. All these areas were reclaimd from the user initiatives by several professions in psychiatry. Personal recovery became the left-over for  the chronic patients, since psycho-therapy is thought not suitable for them. Researchers started formulating new outcome indicators for ‘recovery’, thus once again creating a binary reality: there a successful patients and hopeless patients (concerning recovery). Care providers started talking about recovery targets and professional caregivers started working with pre-set recovery goals for their patients. Experiential experts concerning their own recovery once again became objects of treatment and co-creation in psychiatric innovations disappeared again with the so urgent system change took place.

Recovery 2.0.
What could be a successful step forward towards a ‘recovery 2.0.? How to restore an open dialogue that seemed so promising in the earlier years of the recovery movement? And what would this ‘recovery 2.0’ look like when we really are able to use the best of all perspectives involved in psychiatry? How to come to co-creation where all experts are fully equal to one another?