This book aims to provide a comprehensive account of contemporary practice within psychiatric rehabilitation services and indeed beyond mental health services that have a specific rehabilitation badge. As the second edition of a book first published in 2006, it is a celebration of significant progress in the specialty of rehabilitation and in our broader understanding of how people experiencing severe mental health problems can be supported (or not) in their personal recovery journeys. It is also a celebration of diversity: our authors come from diverse backgrounds and use a wide range of theoretical and practical approaches in their work. Throughout you will read a range of terms to describe the people with whom the services work: ‘patients’, ‘clients’, ‘service users’ (the most popular term), ‘sufferers’ and ‘experts by experience’ are all used by different authors in different contexts. What unites our authors is a passion to support service users in recovering a sense of agency, to allow them to get back control over their lives.

There is no ‘magic bullet’ in rehabilitation practice akin to an antibiotic used early in the course of a bacterial infection. Inevitably, practitioners need to be pragmatic and eclectic in their day-to-day work. This pragmatism rightly involves of being aware of the evidence base, but, given the limitations, conflicts and complexities surrounding that evidence base, rehabilitation practice must also reflect the values of the practitioner and others, notably the service user (Adshead, 2009). Values-based practice is a dynamic process that requires constant reflection – it is a toolkit that can be used to guide decision-making rather than a set of rigid, protocolised rules (Woodbridge & Fulford, 2004; Fulford, 2009). Mental health practice continually presents situations where values conflict – the most obvious example being the use of compulsion to deprive people of their liberty and treat them against their will. More subtle is when the rehabilitation practitioner seeks to improve a person's functional skills or personal hygiene in the face of indifference or even hostility. Practitioners can at times be guilty of not seeing the wood for the trees as they concentrate on eliminating symptoms at the expense of a person's desire to live as good a life as possible on his or her own terms.