Employing Alison Kafer’s ‘crip time’ as a mode of writing, Ayeong unravels the recovery paradigm and its institutional salience.
Note: This essay contains personal experiences of suicidal impulses and self-harm.
In her essay 『After Crip, Crip Afters』, Alison Kafer (2021) experiments with writing ‘crip time’ by weaving together the body of a written text with extended endnotes. Kafer says that ‘rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds’ (Kafer, 2013, p.27). This essay follows a similar model, although with conversational text in italics rather than endnotes. You may read only the main text, only the bits in italics, or both together.
1.
‘Recovery’ was a concept originally devised by people with lived experience of mental distress. ‘Recovery is happening when people can live well in the presence or absence of a condition, diagnosis, or symptoms’ (WHO, 2017, p.11). However, once recovery became a paradigm led by academia, the Korean government (specifically the Ministry of Health and Welfare), and was translated into policy language, its original meaning gradually faded and changed. The Korean Mental Health Welfare Act (2025) defines a service user eligible to participate in the Involuntary Admission Review Committee, where reviews of involuntary hospitalisation take place, as ‘a person who has received treatment and recovered from mental illness,’ (Republic of Korea, 2025), thereby equating having received medical treatment with recovery and the potential to recover. (The Korean Mental Health Welfare Act also defines vocational training recipients as those who have ‘recovered.’ This means only those recognised as recovered can receive training, embedding an ideology that employment itself equals recovery and that work is only possible having received medical intervention. At this point, we can identify the convergence of recovery with neoliberal/capitalist notions of productivity. Recovery shifts from subjective well-being to the capacity to work or be trained to be ‘employable.’ The recovery paradigm demands self-discipline and self-development, diverting us from critiquing and transforming the sanist world.)
2.
But what does it mean to be a ‘recovered’ service user? I attend a four-year university in Seoul. I have a job with social insurance benefits. I have friends, and I have a partner. When I disclose that I have experienced mental illness, people are often shocked. I have even been told that I am not really a person with lived experience. I have been asked to give a recovery talk by a family member of a service user involved in activities at a recovery centre in Korea, because I seemed ‘recovered enough.’
But I am still mad. (‘Sometimes I think it is not I who am mad, but the world. Shells explode everywhere, nonhuman beings die and are killed. I close my eyes and am encouraged to enjoy a peaceful daily life. Sometimes my very existence feels revolting to me.’) I cry as I cut my wrists with a knife, I put my feet on the window ledge wondering if I might die if I jump, then freeze in terror thinking I might actually do it. Outside of work, I can hardly read or write. At dawn and in the evenings, I cry for hours until my eyes swell shut. Sometimes I am seized by violent impulses and plead desperately with any friend I can reach: please, stay with me.
Am I truly recovered? (‘I am not recovered at all. I cannot be satisfied with my state. I want to study when I intend to. I want to stop crying. I want to be liberated from endless emotional torment not through death, but in some other way. Yet I also do not want to live ‘sane’ in a mad world. I want to resonate with, and be troubled by, the pain of others—while moving, however slowly, forward.’)
3.
What does “recovery” really mean? Advocates of recovery often distinguish it from medical treatment, emphasising that recovery can be achieved as separate from full symptom removal (WHO, 2017; Kang et al., 2022).
Yet when the language of recovery is spoken by lawyers, social workers, doctors, by institutions, by sanist academia, and finally by law itself—it becomes a refined replacement for the word ‘treatment’ under medical authority. How different is recovery from treatment, and in what way? (‘Words come to mind: treatment, cure, insight, medication compliance. Then the word recovery again. How different is recovery, spoken by outside experts and authorities, from treatment? A doctor’s ;cure’ verdict (in reality, unattainable)—how different is that from the ‘recovered service user’ proclaimed by social workers and legal experts? And when ‘recovery’ covers academia and institutions as a refined human rights discourse—when recovery is tied to medication, employment, and symptom elimination—recovery and treatment will ultimately be synonyms.’)
(For example, the Social Welfare Foundation Hanwool Mental Health (n.d.), one of the most well-known recovery-oriented rehabilitation centres in Korea, states that ‘recovery from the mental disorder starts from one’s controlling of symptoms’ (Social Welfare Foundation Hanwool Mental Health, n.d.). And even the National Center for Mental Health in Korea presented peer supporters as helpers in recovery, but instructed to stress that ‘taking medication is really important’ (National Center for Mental Health, 2023, p.171.).)
4.
‘Recovery’ has become a symbol of hope. But such hope seems forever unattainable. Recovery is never in the present. Recovery lies in the past. Under the name of recovery, we are endlessly required to reclaim and function in the ‘ordinary life’ of pre-illness. Recovery is never in the present. Recovery lies in the future. Under the name of recovery, we are endlessly required to reclaim and function in the ‘ordinary life’ expected after illness. The present is eternally expelled into the past or deferred into the future. We are denied the present. (‘The present is forever reduced to an unattainable past or future. It flows by only in relation to them. Some people, speaking of unattainable hopes, bind us, confine us, kill us, force-feed us medication. Thus I, here and now, lose all footing in the present. I come to curse and despise my present self.’)
5.
I want to introduce the concept of “crip time”. Crip time refers to time that flows nonlinearly, non-normatively (Samuels, 2017). The time of mad people, too, is crip time. For me, time is utterly unpredictable. Sometimes it races by as I concentrate, sometimes it drags unbearably, leaving me restless. Sometimes it tangles and runs in confusing knots. Its speed, its sequence, become incoherent. Yet institutions enforce linear, normative temporality. They iron out tangled times, forcibly stretching them into a straight timeline.
6.
But crip time is a way of living outside normative clocks. To live in crip time is to resist the linear recovery narrative imposed by institutions. When the recovery paradigm holds the present hostage to past and future, crip time insists on the present. In every moment I arrive late, pause, wait, miss work, begin again—I want to live as myself.
7.
I oppose the recovery paradigm that enforces institutional temporality.
I oppose the recovery paradigm that annihilates me as I am, here and now.
I oppose the recovery paradigm that erases the present and disrespects the temporality of the mad.
8.
And I imagine a world where all body-minds live as they are, in the present.
I imagine going to school, meeting friends, loving, and working—without needing to recover first.
I imagine the crippling of time itself across the world.
About the author
Ayeong is a peer supporter at the Gwanak Peer Respite and an undergraduate in Social Welfare at Seoul National University. Her research interests include peer support, critical disability studies, mad studies, queer studies, and alternative models of mental health care. She also runs a blog dedicated to translating and sharing key works in these fields for Korean readers.
References
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Kafer, Alison. 2021. “After Crip, Crip Afters.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2.
Kang, Sang-Kyung, Kwon, Tae-Yeon, Kim, Moon-Geun, Lee, Yong-Pyo, Ha, Kyung-Hee, and Hong Sun-Mi. 2022. 정신건강사회복지론 [Mental Health Social Work]. Seoul: Hakjisa.
Ministry of Health and Welfare (Republic of Korea). 2023. 정신건강정책 ‘예방 치료 회복’ 전단계 관리로 대전환 [Mental Health Policy ‘100 Percent Coverage from Prevention, Treatment to Recovery’]. Seoul: Ministry of Health and Welfare. Accessed August 2025.
National Center for Mental Health. 2023. 동료지원가 양성과정 [Peer Supporter Training Program]. Seoul: National Center for Mental Health.
Republic of Korea. 2025. Mental Health Promotion and Welfare Services for the Mentally Ill Act (정신건강증진 및 정신질환자 복지서비스지원에 관한 법률). Accessed September 2, 2025. 법제처 국가법령정보센터. https://www.law.go.kr/정신건강증진및정신질환자복지서비스지원에관한법률
Samuels, Ellen. 2017. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”. Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3.
Social Welfare Foundation Hanwool Mental Health. n.d. 회복패러다임소개 [Introduction to the Recovery Paradigm]. Hanwool Mental Health Foundation. Accessed August 2025. https://hanwool.org/recovery1.
World Health Organisation. 2017. Promoting Recovery in Mental Health and Related Services: Handbook for Personal Use and Teaching WHO QualityRights Training to Act, Unite and Empower for Mental Health. Pilot Version. Geneva: World Health Organisation.
