What Education Means to People with Psychiatric Disabilities: A Content Analysis

Abstract

This article examines what supported education means to people coping with psychiatric disabilities and tries to understand whether the educational endeavor has an additional personal value for the consumers beyond its instrumental value. It identifies rehabilitation domains that are most important and best achieved within supported education. Our approach is qualitative: we analyze letters written by students with psychiatric disabilities who have successfully completed high school courses and, through content analysis, identify 45 parameters that illuminate the meaning of the experience for the students. We analyze these parameters in terms of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We find that for our population education is also a process of recovery of lost roles and capabilities and fulfills self-actualization needs. The shift from the “patient” to the “student” role is a very powerful one. To exchange the patient role for one that brings with it prestige and power promotes rehabilitation in ways that “merely” receiving societal support and acquiring specific skills can rarely achieve.

Keywords:

• Disabilities
• Education
• Maslow
• Meaning
• Psychiatric
• Rehabilitation

We are indebted to Dr. Alexander Ponizovsky, Nahum Steigman, Sara Turel, and Roberto Kleinfeld for their very helpful comments. We thank all the students in the Supported Education Program in Israel whose writings served as the basis for our analysis; their names have been changed in order to protect their privacy.

Notes

¹The names of the students have been changed.