One evening in the summer of 1990, 1 accompanied to choir practice at her church a woman who was participating in my current study. She is in her forties, the mother of three and grandmother of one, is AfricanAmerican, and is diagnosed with schizophrenia. The only Caucasian present, I sat in a back pew with her granddaughter on my knees and her teen-age daughter at my side. When the choir began to sing, my acquaintance's face and posture were transformed from troubled and self-conscious to joyful, free, and flowing. Her face and body reflected relief, peace, and happiness as she swayed with the music; she was a different person from the psychotic, fearful, confused woman I had first interviewed in a hospital two years previously. After practice, she chatted easily with friends of many years (none of the people I saw with her that night appeared on the social network I had painstakingly elicited from her on two separate occasions), introduced me to a sister I had not heard about in four research interviews, and seemed socially nested a mother, grandmother, and sister who was part of her community. This woman had not had the benefit of psychosocial rehabilitation services: she had had primarily the benefit of herself and the passage of time as a means of getting better, plus Prolixin and a monthly visit to a busy psychiatrist at a mental health center. The psychiatrist told her