There is developing interest in the concept of personal recovery in bipolar although research to date is limited. Personal recovery reflects the ability to a living a full and engaged life of personal value alongside the challenges of a chronic mental health issue. This talk will present research on how this concept is understood by people with bipolar and the extent to which concepts of clinical and personal recovery in bipolar disorder overlap and diverge. The only measure specifically designed to measure personal recovery in bipolar is the personal recovery questionnaire (BRQ). We already have evidence that this measure is acceptable, reliable and sensitive to change. However more work is needed to unpick the core aspects of recovery within this measure and how these might interrelate. This talk will therefore also report on a network analysis of data from 394 people with bipolar collected across four outcome studies. It will highlight the network structure of personal recovery based on BRQ including key items, communities and primary nodes within the data. The results of this work will be discussed with respect to understanding of personal recovery in bipolar. These findings will be reviewed in relation to developing evidence for the potential benefits of recovery focused therapy and plans for future research in this field across the lifespan.