City Research Online

Abstract

Background: Mental health recovery is widely used as an organising concept in contemporary services, yet how service users construct it remains under examined. These constructions shape what individuals can claim, expect and enact within support settings.

Aims: This study examined how NHS Talking Therapies service users in England construct recovery and what these constructions shape.

Methods: Eighteen semi‑structured interviews with individuals who completed therapy within NHS Talking Therapies were analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis, tracing the discursive resources participants drew upon, the subject positions made available, and the implications for recovery practices.

Results: Participants reproduced longstanding constructions of recovery as an individual task of self‑management while also mobilising relational, sociocultural and structural discourses shaped by wider material conditions. These resources were hybridised to produce Third Space (“in‑between”) constructions, drawing on Bhabha’s notion of hybridity. Rather than reflecting neutral psychosocial integration, these hybrid practices operated as technologies of the self through which participants rearticulated available recovery rationalities to generate alternative, agentic subject positions.

Conclusions: Recovery talk did not simply describe psychological progress but actively produced distinct practices and forms of subjectivation. Recognising the hybridity of these constructions can support more context responsive, equitable and socially attuned approaches to recovery.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026, the authors. This is the accepted manuscript of an article published by [Publisher]. Please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions for information on re-use.
Publisher Keywords:	Mental health recovery, discourses, NHS Talking Therapies, Binaries, Hybrid practices
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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