Promoting Reflection on the Process of Recovery: Unique Contributions from Literature and the Humanities for Practitioner

Paul H. Lysaker, David Roe, John T. Lysaker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
JournalCommunity Mental Health Journal
Early online date5 Mar 2024
DOIs
StateE-pub ahead of print - 5 Mar 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.

Keywords

  • Humanities
  • Literature
  • Negative capability
  • Recovery
  • Serious mental illness

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Health(social science)
  • Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
  • Psychiatry and Mental health

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