Personal Recovery from Psychosis: Can We Measure It and What Factors Are Important in Understanding and Facilitating such Recovery?
Poster C44, Saturday, October 22, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, Le Baron
Tony Morrison1,2; 1School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK, 2Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester
A collaborative research programme examining psychosocial approaches to understanding and promoting recovery from psychosis, in a manner that is acceptable to and empowering of service users, will be described. Several user-led studies of recovery have identified a number of common themes including understanding of self, empowerment, rebuilding life and the inspiration of hope, and these have led to the development of a meaningful and patient-centred measure of recovery. The use of this measure as an outcome in several clinical trials will be examined, as will the relationship between subjective user-defined recovery and clinical outcomes including psychiatric symptoms and functioning. A study that directly tests the role of psychological factors and psychiatric symptoms in everyday judgements of perceived recovery from psychosis using experience sampling methods will also be described. In one of the studies, A Delphi approach was utilized to allow a large sample of service users to be anonymously consulted about their views on recovery. Service users were invited to take part in a 3-stage consultation process. A total of 381 participants gave their views on recovery in the main stage of this study, with 100 of these taking part in the final review stage. The final list of statements about recovery included 94 items, which were rated as essential or important by >80% of respondents. Items with extremely high consensus (>90%) were ‘Recovery is the achievement of a personally acceptable quality of life’ and ‘Recovery is feeling better about yourself’. Overall, the findings provide further evidence that self-esteem and hope, rather than psychiatric symptoms, play important roles in influencing patients’ experiences of recovery. The results of several studies establishing consensus about aspects of recovery and treatment preferences and priorities using people with psychosis as experts by experience should have implications for clinical services.
Topic Area: Service System Development and Reform