Has recovery failed?

I've thought it. Others have thought it.

You get to a point of despair, and you conclude that recovery fails, because, if, after 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, you feel like 'this', the 'this' cannot be remedied: if it could be remedied, it would have been by now.

This is erroneous on two levels.

Firstly, despair is a distorting lens: it retroactively recasts the past as a monochrome path leading ineluctably to despair, with no hesitation, deviation, nuance, or complexity. It deletes any information or experience that does not accord with its view. Despair construes itself to have always existed, and dismisses anything but itself as a chimera, an illusion, a fluff, a fragment, a flash in the pan, a glint of light, a momentary cloudbreak, a trick, a fraud, a convention, an ignis fatuus, fool's gold, a pipedream, a gauze bandage that the wound always bleeds through. In reality, it is despair that is the great deceiver.

Secondly, plays, films, and stock markets have dips: moments of despair. The moments can be protracted into nauseous litanies of depression and anxiety: the psychological bear market. 

If you stop watching or cash out your investments, you're locking in the despair.

The truth is that any despair can be resolved, but first it must be faced and brought into the light.

When this is combined with willingness to follow direction and consequential action, it resolves.