Recovery and economics

Personal recovery as an approach to psychiatric rehabilitation is attracting growing attention in many health systems. It emphasises attainment of personal goals, meaning and control in life, rather than symptom alleviation. We examine what economic evidence there is in relation to a set of interventions that could be seen to be consistent with a recovery-focused approach. These include peer support, self-management, supported employment, welfare and debt advice, joint crisis plans and advance directives, supported housing, physical health promotion, personal budgets, anti-stigma campaigns and recovery colleges. For some interventions we could find no economic evidence, and for some others it was methodologically weak, but the interventions for which we could find evidence generally did not appear to increase costs, and many represented cost-effective uses of resources.