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

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.

It is only in the past 20 years that the concept of 'recovery' from mental health has been more widely considered and researched. Before then, it was generally considered that 'stability' was the best that anyone suffering from a mental disorder could hope for. But now it is recognised that, throughout their mental illness, many patients develop new beliefs, feelings, values, attitudes, and ways of dealing with their disorder. The notion of recovery from mental illness is thus rapidly being accepted and is inserting more hope into mainstream psychiatry and other parts of the mental health care system around the world. Yet, in spite of conceptual and other challenges that this notion raises, including a variety of interpretations, there is scarcely any systematic philosophical discussion of it. This book is unique in addressing philosophical issues - including conceptual challenges and opportunities - raised by the notion of recovery of people with mental illness. Such recovery - particularly in relation to serious mental illness such as schizophrenia - is often not about cure and can mean different things to different people. For example, it can mean symptom alleviation, ability to work, or the striving toward mental well-being (with or without symptoms). The book addresses these different meanings and their philosophical grounds, bringing to the fore perspectives of people with mental illness and their families as well as perspectives of philosophers, mental health care providers and researchers, among others. The important new work will contribute to further research, reflective practice and policy making in relation to the recovery of people with mental illness.It is essential reading for philosophers of health, psychiatrists, and other mental care providers, as well as policy makers.

"This book can help you develop a spirited savvy in recovery-oriented cognitive therapy over the course of fifteen chapters, which we have organized into three parts: The first six chapters in Part I introduce you to recovery-oriented cognitive therapy, the basic model and how it works. Building on the basics, the five chapters in Part II extend understanding, strategy, and intervention to the challenges that have historically gotten the person stuck: negative symptoms, delusions, hallucinations, communication challenges, trauma, self-injury, aggressive behavior, and substance use. The final four chapters in Part III delve deeper into specific settings and applications - individual therapy, therapeutic milieu, group therapy, and families"--

This book brings together two bodies of knowledge - wellbeing and recovery. Wellbeing and 'positive' approaches are increasingly influencing many areas of society. Recovery in mental illness has a growing empirical evidence base. For the first time, overlaps and cross-fertilisation opportunities between the two bodies of knowledge are identified. International experts present innovations taking place within the mental health system, which include wellbeing-informed new therapies, e-health approaches and peer-led recovery communities. State-of-the-art applications of wellbeing to the wider community are also described, across education, employment, parenting and city planning. This book will be of interest to anyone connected with the mental health system, especially people using and working in services, and clinical and administrators leaders, and those interested in using research from the mental health system in the wider community.

This is a vital resource for anyone looking to better support people with psychosis and serious mental illnesses.