By: Paolo Rosselini
Submitted: 2011-11-22 06:00:53 | Word Count: 657
The book consists of six chapters. After an introductory chapter, the results of a systematic review of recovery studies over the past 15 years are presented in Chapter 2. The chapter starts with a summary of the data of 15 longitudinal studies conducted between 1969 and 2001. Thereafter, a review of 27 qualitative studies published between 1993 and 2009 is presented. The chapter concludes with the results of a cluster analysis.
In chapters 3 and 4 the results of a qualitative empirical study, based on the analysis of 13 narratives, are described. This study was conducted among people with (long-term) mental health care experiences in the Netherlands, focusing on both their personal story and their conceptions about what effectively helped them in their recovery process. The aim of this part of the study was to find out what happened to them in terms of life events and their mental disorder, how the person dealt with vulnerability, and what the role of the environment was. I was especially curious to find out which factors hindered or facilitated progress. Within this analysis there was a special focus on the role of mental health care. What services did the participants perceive to be helpful? What is considered by the participants to be 'good care'? Chapter 3 describes aspects of vulnerability and recovery that came to the fore from the analysis. In Chapter 4, the results of a secondary analysis are presented. In this analysis I searched for essential notions in the interaction between the narrators and professional caregivers. I investigated themes in the stories that were associated with good care.
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In Chapter 5, the insights of this narrative study are developed into a theory of good care by connecting these findings to other relevant studies and theories. In Chapter 6, a translation is made from theory to a practice of good care.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 describes the objectives, background and methodological design of this study.
The objectives of this study were the following:
1. To contribute to knowledge about recovery and professional support for recovery.
2. To contribute to a theory of good care (for vulnerable people) on the basis of an ethic of care.
3. To contribute to practices of good care by eliciting essential elements of good care.
For decades, scientific and professional practitioners have studied, written and spoken about people with mental illness. Over the past decades, the influence of 'consumers' in both practice and research has increased considerably. Under the influence of the rehabilitation and recovery movements, their personal experiences are now increasingly being heard. Their position has changed from that of passive object to active subject. They have moved from the role of a patient, client or consumer into the role of an expert-by-experience, a co-researcher or a peer specialist. A new type of (scientific or at least grounded) knowledge is sprouting: experiential knowledge that complements other scientific sources. For professional practice, it puts the relevance and importance of personal experiences and the conceptualisation of the person involved about his or her present and future situation in the centre of interest.
This is the reason why I decided to conduct an empirical qualitative study by collecting and analysing narratives of people who have experienced or are still experiencing serious mental health problems. Besides learning about factors hindering and facilitating recovery, I wanted to learn from their experiences of professional services. I was convinced that by thoroughly analysing data from a 'client's perspective', evidence could be found of factors that really contribute to health and wellbeing. For the research design, I decided to collect evidence on the basis of the experiences of service users only, and not from professionals, in order not to 'contaminate' the experiential data.
This study is qualitative by nature. Empirical data were used for conceptual analysis, using the methodology of grounded theory. Grounded theory is a qualitative research approach that enables the eliciting of new insights into phenomena and novel theoretical formulations from data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).
