While objectively measurable outcomes have been emphasized in modern psychiatry, subjective or patient-reported outcome measures have attracted renewed interest recently. This trend coincides with the advent of the concept of "personal recovery". We psychiatrists may have become too accustomed to institutionalized care and academic frameworks of psychopathology and biological psychiatry and, thus, be so incapable of maintaining an insight into the patient's life in the real-world that we might share a medically biased misunderstanding of the concept. Our task here is to scientifically clarify the construct of the concept of personal recovery in order to optimize clinical services and professional education so that they are recovery-oriented.
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