The processes of recovery from schizophrenia: The emergent role of integrative psychotherapy, recent developments, and new directions

Empirical study of the long-term course of schizophrenia reveals that recovery is often possible and involves different experiences for different people who have the same psychiatric condition. While, for some, recovery may mean symptom remission or the achievement of psychosocial milestones, for others, recovery involves subjective changes in their experience of identity and agency in the world. We suggest that the recognition that recovery may involve the recapturing a sense of identity and agency points to the need for the development of integrative psychotherapy that can bring together a range of interventions under an internally consistent theoretical network, rather than merely a multitude of highly specific or isolated approaches. In this introduction to the special issue, we explore the rationale for the need for integrative approaches and possible theoretical basis that might enable an integrative approach to make full use of emerging empirical work from a range of perspectives.