Recovery has become prominent within the field of psychiatry and is often mentioned as a guiding concept for how to provide rehabilitation and treatment to people with a mental illness.

I view recovery as a strategy that is sought implemented in the field of psychiatry, but also as a concept that is introduced to the field while being essentially “a tabula rasa”, leaving room for different actors to pour meaning into the concept. This leads to a situation where recovery has a polyphony of different meanings that influence practice in various ways.

I use ethnographic methods to examine understandings/perceptions of recovery in both social and treatment psychiatric organizations. Furthermore, I examine how different understandings compete and interact with each other in determining practice within the field of psychiatric services and, as an important addition to this, how recovery is used by different stakeholders to legitimize their preferred practice.