Challenges to assisting with the recovery of personal identity and wellness for persons with serious mental illness: Considerations for mental health professionals

Abstract

With the expectation that many can recover from schizophrenia, the implications for the roles of practitioners to assist them are critical. Although much has been written about how to empower a recovering person to develop a more positive identity, an important area which seems relatively underdeveloped in the literature pertains to the challenges and suffering borne from the process of recovery itself. The current paper will suggest that there are four related, though independent, challenges associated with the recovery process that practitioners should be prepared to address: (1) the discomfort elicited by the loss of, or threats to, a previous sense of identity, (2) the loss of previous ways of making meaning of the world, (3) awareness of concrete losses in one’s life which have occurred, and (4) accepting oneself as an ordinary, though agentic, person. For each we will review experimental, clinical, and first-person literature and refer to an illustrative vignette. Through recognition of these potentially painful challenges, practitioners may be even more effective in supporting recovery.

Keywords:

• schizophrenia
• recovery
• identity
• grief
• metacognition
• depression