One size fits all: or horses for courses? Recovery-based care in specialist mental health services.

Introduction: The ‘recovery approach’ to the management of severe mental health problems has become a guiding vision of service provision amongst many practitioners, researchers, and policy makers as well as service users.

Method: This qualitative pilot study explored the meaning of ‘recovery’ with users of three specialist mental health services (eating disorders, dual diagnosis, and forensic) in 18 semi-structured interviews.

Results: The relevance of themes identified in mainstream recovery literature was confirmed; however, the interpretation and relative weight of these themes appeared to be affected by factors that were specific to the diagnosis and treatment context.