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RESEARCH WEEKLY: Definitions of Personal Recovery
By Shanti Silver
(December 14, 2022) Helping people to recover from mental illness is a key component of modern mental health policy. Discussions of recovery often focus on clinical recovery, which is defined and evaluated by clinicians. However, using narrow definitions of recovery for people with severe mental illness can lead to feelings of alienation or abandonment for people who do not relate to those definitions. Accordingly, when examining recovery, it is important to hear from people with severe mental illness about the ways they understand their own recovery. In a new study from Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, researchers interviewed people with psychotic disorders to explore their definitions of personal recovery.
Study Details
Twenty people from Ireland who had diagnosed psychotic disorders and had experienced their first episode of psychosis twenty years ago were included in the study. Participant interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded into themes based on participants’ statements and opinions regarding recovery. Through this process, the researchers explored how people defined recovery from mental illness twenty years after their first episode of psychosis.
Key Findings
One way that participants understood recovery was as the ability to generate meaning in life. For some participants, this meant finding meaning in their existence through connecting with themselves, other people, or nature, while for others this meant creating meaning out of their psychotic experiences through helping others with psychosis. Some also understood recovery as righting the inequalities caused by their mental illness. These participants expressed that recovery would mean they had achieved the ability to fulfill societal responsibilities, were respected as an adult and/or had reclaimed power in their life.
Other participants expressed that they would be recovered when they had the ability to bounce back from difficulties and then continue their pursuit of happiness and full engagement with life. Participants additionally understood recovery as attaining a positive relationship with time, such as being able to move on from the past or taking steps toward a hopeful future. Some participants also understood recovery as the ability to accept the reality that they didn’t always know how to define, pursue, or engage with recovery, while others viewed recovery as a concept that they didn’t feel applied to them.
Implications
In this study, people with psychotic disorders related personal recovery to concepts such as purpose, equality, feelings of agency and time. While the generalizability of these findings is limited by the small number of participants included in this study, it appears to be the case that people who have lived with psychotic disorders for decades have multi-dimensional and complex views on what it means to recover from mental illness. Embracing an understanding of recovery that allows for ambiguity and complexity may help people with severe mental illness who have trouble conceptualizing or relating to the word ‘recovery’ avoid feeling alienated by services as they work to manage life with mental illness.
References
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