mental illness recovery (or paliatives) depends on three legs: meds, for the critic situations, but the most important thing is, as you tell, therapy, and environment. As patient and social worker experienced on mental health, I always make an effort on these two, therapy is a real helpful part, and working on environment (family, friends, relatives, home, work, school or college...) will make a drastic change and really help on recovering and adapting better the patient. Look at me, for example, I have had a change of meds in may, because I started a depressive crisis in november, only passed 1 of the 5 subjects at college (by this time 3th of the 4 years this studies take) in january. After may, I passed only 3 of 5 (one was a research work with others, one was english and the other was designing projects, just as easy as english you see). So here I am, the change of meds led was because I couldn't focus cognitively, at anything at all. Change led me to a severe anxiety crisis in the middle of class, so the teacher had to take me to the hospital (he works with severe mental health people) because I couldn't even tell where I was (and my college is beside the hospital!), so more meds, and more suicidal thoughts. I go every friday to group therapy, and recently they saw me so bad that the psycologist and social worker caught me apart and asked what was going on, and had to confess that I had planned a date for suicide, so we started heavy work with personal therapy, and review meds, as we are viewing what to do, as environment cannot change, at least family and work... I resteem it, and of course, if you follow me, these kind of posts will be common... the social work and how social work is there for more than help after disaster, we can help prevent!