Behind the Rhetoric: Mental Health Recovery in Ontario

Recovery has taken the mental health world by storm. In clinics, hospitals, community organizations and governments across North America and Europe, recovery rhetoric is everywhere. Its message of hope is catchy, its promise of wellness long overdue and its claims (somewhat) substantiated. But where did this new vision for mental health come from and what does it really mean for a system long unbalanced? Focusing on Ontario’s mental health communities, the book is the first to take a critical look at recovery’s talk and texts. Using Foucault’s analyses of discourse, it is also the first to go behind recovery’s rhetoric of hope and responsibility, re-theorizing mental health recovery in Canada.

Jennifer (Jen) Poole (she/her) is a white settler from England living in Tkaronto, the traditional territory of the the Petun, the Huron-Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg, the Métis, and the Mississaugas. This land is covered by the Dish with One Spoon wampum, the Williams Treaties, and Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit. Poole is a long-time community peer supporter and full professor in the School of Social Work at Toronto Metropolitan University. With a love of teaching/learning and a life shaped by madness and grief, Jen’s work is concerned with sanism(s), loss, pedagogies, and interrupting colonialism and white supremacy.