The Existential Dimension in Recovery: Crisis, Loss, and Grief in the Context of Severe Mental Illness

The recovery movement in mental health care has played an important role in the recent renewed and growing focus on understanding the function of meaning and spirituality in the context of severe mental illness. Current recovery thinking is firmly embedded in a body of thought according to which people have meaningful lives. It is characterized by various emphases, among which positive transformation. Though valuable and laudable in itself, this bias toward future-oriented improvement leaves our understanding of the nature and implications of a mental health crisis as a crisis in meaning underdeveloped. In this article, we approach recovery from a phenomenological angle and explore mental health crisis as an existential crisis characterized by disruption and radical alteration of sense-making and meaning. In particular, we show how themes of loss and grief are part of this existential crisis and its aftermath. It is argued that themes of loss and grief are crucial aspects of the recovery process. Several fruitful ways are suggested to incorporate those themes. This, it is maintained, provides a more thorough, realistic, integrated, and, therefore, more nuanced view of the complex process of recovery in the context of severe mental illness.