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Abstract

Contemporary recovery-paradigms are widely treated as self-evident clinical aims, yet they are historically and sociopolitically produced through sedimented power/knowledge-relations. This thesis problematises the notion of "recovery" within NHS–IAPT, situating it within these historically-layered discursive-conditions and tracing how it has been shaped through moral, biomedical, neoliberal and survivor discursive-logics. It addresses three questions: (1) which discursive-resources service-users mobilise when articulating recovery, (2) how these constructions produce power-relations and subject-positions, and (3) how participants reconfigure these logics. Adopting a social-constructionist epistemology and a critical-realist sensibility, I conducted a genealogically-informed Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (using Willig’s six-stage approach) of semi-structured interviews with 18 former service-users. This constitutes the first genealogically-informed FDA of recovery as operationalised in NHS–IAPT. Participants predominantly mobilised an individual-responsibility discourse, articulated through sub-discourses of a "responsible-citizen", "proactive-patient" and "normal-person", which collectively-configured recovery as a responsibilised-project. Alongside these dominant-logics, counter-discourses of relationality and social justice emerged, visibilising the limits of responsibilisation and the sociomaterial-conditions that shape what can be articulated as recovery. A central and original contribution of this thesis is the identification of a hybrid "Third Space" of recovery, developed through the creative analytic-integration of Foucauldian genealogy with Bhabha’s theorisation of hybridity. This was traced inductively through the analysis, acting as a conceptual-response to discursive-patterns taking-shape in the text. It articulates the interstitial-terrain where dominant and marginalised discursive-logics are reworked and hybridised, producing ambiguous, fluid and contingent configurations that elude binaries of individual/social or compliance/resistance. This hybrid site is not theorised in existing recovery scholarship and offers a novel analytic-vocabulary for understanding recovery. The thesis contributes practically to counselling psychology by visibilising the historically-produced discursive-conditions and the limitations of individualised recovery metrics. It supports more context-sensitive and socially just approaches to mental-health practice and policy. Through tracing the discursive-tensions of contemporary-recovery paradigms, the study opens new possibilities within and beyond NHS–IAPT.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HM Sociology R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Psychology & Neuroscience School of Health & Medical Sciences > School of Health & Medical Sciences Doctoral Theses Doctoral Theses

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