Patients need to be relieved of their conditions and returned to their premorbid, healthy, or more accurately not-ill state. A comfortable treatment relationship between powerful healing professionals and helpless patients complying with orders they need not really understand results in a clear recovery. This model tends to break down for chronic medical conditions. Striking examples can be found in most nursing homes. Even with common illness like hypertension, recovery is difficult to conceptualize within this model.
Hypertension is often asymptomatic even untreated.
If we were to move on to more complicated chronic illnesses like diabetes, psychiatrists' favorite medical analogy, the model would be even more inadequate in conceptualizing recovery. For severe mental illness it may seem almost dishonest to talk about recovery. After all, the conditions are likely to persist, in at least some form, indefinitely. The way out of this dilemma is by realizing that, whereas the illness is the object of curative treatment efforts, it is the persons themselves who are the objects of recovery efforts. The medical model handles this by making it a two-step process.