Recovery through spirituality

This essay explores whether recovery can be facilitated through spirituality. By approaching recovery from a Mad Studies perspective, and viewing recovery as resistance to sanism, one could argue that spirituality could be a force to resist dominant biomedical interpretations of experiences of mental and emotional distress and recovery. Thus, through the powerful narrative of Viktoria, one could illuminate the force of spirituality as a source of survival of social invalidation – that is, survival of the psychosocial forces that were the source of the experience of mental distress, and survival of social oppression by the psychiatric services and/or wider society.