Psychological preconditions for flourishing through ultrabilitation: a descriptive framework

Abstract

Purpose: Rehabilitation is commonly portrayed as care that seeks to enable persons who are disabled to recover as normal a state of well-being as their personal and social circumstances allow. In contrast, this article frames psychological preconditions for persons living with disabilities to flourish toward, around or even beyond recovery through health care provision before, during or after injury.

Method: This conceptual article uses reasoning and creative word play, informed by experience and literature from disciplines including psychology and philosophy.

Results: Ultrabilitation promotes seven psychological preconditions of flourishing by persons with disabilities. These interconnected conditions are: apprehension; appetite; “attitude”; ambiguity; autonomy; accountability and ambiopia.

Conclusions: Clinicians could partner with persons living with disabilities to promote these mental preconditions for flourishing, and use ultrabilitation to resist potentially destabilizing forces such as social imperatives to recovery and normalcy.

Implications for rehabilitation

• Clinicians can support persons with disabilities to optimize mental states that enable them to flourish in everyday life.

• Apprehension, including awareness of and anxiety about disability and its management, can motivate persons to assent to capabilities to flourish.

• Apprehension and ambiguity can feed an appetite for personal growth and an attitude that trusts in genuine possibilities for growth through autonomy and accountability.

• Autonomy frees persons to accept what they cannot change; set and implement challenging but achievable goals in creative ways; and learn to lose control without viewing disability as something that they need to get beyond in order to flourish.

Keywords:

• Rehabilitation
• disability
• flourishing
• psychology
• ultrabilitation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.