Promoting Reflection on the Process of Recovery

Recovery from serious mental illness requires persons to make their own meaning and deal with evolving challenges and possibilities. Psychiatric rehabilitation thus must offer more than manualized curricula that address symptoms and skills. We suggest that exposure to the humanities and in particular literature may offer practitioners unique avenues for developing interventions that are sensitive to the processes that enable meaning to be made. We suggest that through what the poet Keats called negative capability, reading novels may enhance practitioners? abilities to see and accept uncertainty, tolerate ambiguity without need for complete resolution, and accept the complex and ambiguous nature of persons. As an illustration we described how reading two novels, The Trial and Slaughterhouse-Five enhanced the process of meaning making while supporting the recovery of one prototypical person with serious mental illness during his efforts to make sense of his experience of returning to work

Ambiguity · Curriculum · Linguistics · Meaning (existential · Mental health · Mental illness · Pedagogy · Process (computing · Psychiatry · Psychological intervention · Psychotherapist · Reading (process · Computer Science · Empathy and Medical Education · Medicine · Mental Health and Patient Involvement · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Psychology

• Negative Capability May Solve Psychiatry’s Credibility Crisis

  Open Access•Helene Speyer, David Roe et al.•Culture Medicine and Psychiatry•2026

  Incluir item

• Introduction to Special Issue on Recovery at 30

  Open Access•Steingard Sandra•Community Mental Health Journal•2025

  Incluir item