Mental Health Recovery: What Helps and What Hinders? A National Research Project for the Development of Recovery Facilitating System Performance Indicators evolved from collaborative efforts among a number of State Mental Health Agencies (SMHAs). These states were interested in developing a measure related to recovery as one of a set of indicators that can be used to assess the performance of state and local mental health systems and providers. The specific aims of this project were to: -increase knowledge about what facilitates or hinders recovery from psychiatric disabilities; -devise a core set of systems-level indicators that measure critical elements and processes of a recovery-facilitating environment; and -integrate items that assess recovery-orientation into a multi-state "report card" of mental health system performance measures, in order to generate comparable data across state and local mental health systems and encourage the evolution of recovery-oriented systems. (NTAC)