Recovery Psychology

Recovery psychology is the scientific study and application of psychology for the purpose of understanding mental health recovery. It is explicitly concerned with the expeirince, processess, behaviors and phenomenology of recovery from psychological disorders and the psychological context for the development of recovery theory. Recovery psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes, perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships of recovery from psychological disorders. It has emerged as a reaction to both abnormal psychology and clinical psychology. Recovery psychology differs from the two in the basic principles. Abnormal psychology is the study of abnormal behavior in order to describe, predict, explain, and change abnormal patterns of functioning. Recovery psychology holds that describing, predicting or explaining behavior has been going on for a considerable amount of history, with little yeild of any real progress with the treatment of psychological disorders. Recovery psychology also holds the notion that a psychologists have no business trying to change an individuals pattern of functioning, they can do that themselves. Abnormal psychology studies the nature of psychopathology and its causes, and this knowledge is applied in clinical psychology to treat a patient with psychological disorders. In the study of abnormal behavior, it can be difficult to define the line between which behaviors are considered normal and which are not. In general, abnormal behaviors must be maladaptive and cause an individual subjective discomfort Clinical psychology is the scientific study and application of psychology for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development. Recovery psychology points out that there has been no true understanding or prevention of psychological disorders. Recovery psychology emerges from the prespective of the cliental view as an academic studying abnormal and clinical psychology, seeing no relief from psychologically-based distress or dysfunction or subjective well-being and personal development as result of anything clinical. Recovery psychology is in part a consumer science, meaning it is about what works for the cliental, not what the clinician feels is working for the client. It has been seen that every human aspect whether classified as abnormal or normal seems to always fall in to the abnormal descriptive in the eyes of clinicians; such as in the case of anger, it is human for the clinician to expeirince anger while the client expeirincing the same is seen as being symptomatic of a disorder. This is termed by writers from the recovery paradigm, most notably Judi Chamberlin, as mentalism. Recovery psychology would view the human aspect of anger as being a stepping stone on the path to recovery and not an aspect of disorder. Recovery psychology holds the view that "we already know what disorder is" and that what "we need to concern ourselves with is finding order in our lives." Recovery psychology is not to be confused with psychiatric rehabilitation, which it may serve as a complimentary counterpart as clinical psychology is to psychiatry. To some degree, recovery psychology is a healthy shot of anti-psychiatric values, while it is entirely pro-mental health. Whatever leads to recovery should be the study of recovery psychology, cases where a person recovers from a psychological disorder by means of using psychiatry should be studied equally to that of those who recover from psychological disorders without using psychiatry. Recovery psychology does not aim to be an "anti" position on any issue, it aims to be about recovery. The reality that people do recover from psychological disorders without any intervention once so ever, confirms that recovery needs to be researched, in some cases these individuals who recover have serious anti-psychiatry beliefs. Yet, it is viewed as this person who recovers without psychiatry or clinical psychology, as if they have abbandonned the scientific arena yet their phenomena of their recovery still requires study does it not?