Recovery From Severe Mental Illnesses

Recovery, Meaning-Making, and Severe Mental Illness offers practitioners an integrative treatment model that will stimulate and harness their creativity, allowing for the formation of new ideas about wellness in the face of profound suffering. The model, Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy (MERIT), complements current treatment modalities and can be used by practitioners from a broad range of theoretical backgrounds. By using metacognitive capacity as a guide to intervention, MERIT stretches and strengthens practitioners’ capacity for reflection and allows them to better use their unique knowledge to help people who are confronting the suffering and chaos that often comes from psychosis. Clinicians will come away from this book with a variety of tools for helping clients manage their own recovery and confront the issues that accompany an illness-based identity.

Focuses on a shift away from traditional clinical preoccupations towards new priorities of supporting the patient.

It is only in the past 20 years that the concept of 'recovery' from mental health has been more widely considered and researched. This book is unique in addressing philosophical issues - including conceptual challenges and opportunities - raised by the notion of recovery of people with mental illness.

Estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 4 Americans will experience a mental health problem or will misuse alcohol or drugs in their lifetimes. These disorders are among the most highly stigmatized health conditions in the United States, and they remain barriers to full participation in society in areas as basic as education, housing, and employment. Improving the lives of people with mental health and substance abuse disorders has been a priority in the United States for more than 50 years. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 is considered a major turning point in America's efforts to improve behavioral healthcare. It ushered in an era of optimism and hope and laid the groundwork for the consumer movement and new models of recovery. The consumer movement gave voice to people with mental and substance use disorders and brought their perspectives and experience into national discussions about mental health. However over the same 50-year period, positive change in American public attitudes and beliefs about mental and substance use disorders has lagged behind these advances. Stigma is a complex social phenomenon based on a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype that assigns undesirable labels, qualities, and behaviors to a person with that attribute. Labeled individuals are then socially devalued, which leads to inequality and discrimination. This report contributes to national efforts to understand and change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that can lead to stigma and discrimination. Changing stigma in a lasting way will require coordinated efforts, which are based on the best possible evidence, supported at the national level with multiyear funding, and planned and implemented by an effective coalition of representative stakeholders. Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change explores stigma and discrimination faced by individuals with mental or substance use disorders and recommends effective strategies for reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek treatment and other supportive services. It offers a set of conclusions and recommendations about successful stigma change strategies and the research needed to inform and evaluate these efforts in the United States.

In February 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop to explore options for expanding the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) behavioral health data collections to include measures of recovery from substance use and mental disorder. Participants discussed options for collecting data and producing estimates of recovery from substance use and mental disorders, including available measures and associated possible data collection mechanisms. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

An essential volume for improving understanding of the recovery process for people diagnosed with schizophrenia Schizophrenia is widely considered the most severe and disabling of the mental illnesses. Yet recent research has demonstrated that many people afflicted with the disorder are able to recover to a significant degree. Living Outside Mental Illness demonstrates the importance of listening to what people diagnosed with schizophrenia themselves have to say about their struggle, and shows the dramatic effect this approach can have on clinical practice and social policy. It presents an in-depth investigation, based on a phenomenological perspective, of experiences of illness and recovery as illuminated by compelling first-person descriptions. This volume forcefully makes the case for the utility of qualitative methods in improving our understanding of the reasons for the success or failure of mental health services. The research has important clinical and policy implications, and will be of key interest to those in psychology and the helping professions as well as to people in recovery and their families.

This book brings together current research on recovery and wellbeing, to inform mental health systems and wider community development.