Behind the rhetoric of hope: A critical analysis of recovery discourses in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Originally attributed to Americans Deegan (1988) and Anthony (1993), 'recovery' rejects the notion that those diagnosed with mental illness can never be 'well', claiming instead that with self-care, pharmacology, choice and hope, clinical trajectories can be improved and lives reclaimed for more productive ends. These claims have made the recovery vision (Anthony 1993) very popular over the last decade, spawning more progressive practices in the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom as well as a body of work replete with personal accounts, conceptual frameworks and longitudinal outcome studies. However, seldom do we hear about the Canadian experience and very few have taken a more discursive approach to recovery and its talk. Seeking to address these gaps, I turned to Foucault's notions of discourse, power, knowledge, resistance and confession, asking how the prevailing discourses on recovery are taking shape in Ontario and what their implications may be for policy and practice. A critical discourse analysis informed by the work of Fairclough (1992) and Jager (2002), the inquiry began with the collection and analysis of recovery texts now circulating through Ontario's mental health communities. Seventeen semi-structured interviews were then conducted with a diverse theoretical sample of key informants including representatives from consumer and family organizations, professionals, policy makers and educators. Guided by the research questions, the data was analyzed, attending to themes, slogans, metaphorism, discursive devices and intertextuality. Filling a gap in the literature, my findings point to five distinct local discourses on recovery including 'hope and faith talk', 'story talk' and 'marketing talk'. They also point to local and international 'players', an unusual amount of metaphorism and clear rules around who can speak recovery in Ontario now. Based on these findings, I argue that recovery is a Foucauldian discursive formation in Ontario with its own particular objects of knowledge, producers of discursivity, criteria for what knowledge is accepted/rejected and tussles over discursive territory. No longer just a hopeful 'vision' for how to do mental health better, I suggest that in Ontario, recovery is a deeply contested discursive terrain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.069 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".