title: Recovery entails bridging the multiple realms of best practice: towards a more integrated approach to evidence-based clinical treatment and psychosocial disability support for mental health recovery.
abstract: While mental health recovery is a very personal process, the approach also offers possibilities as a meta-framework for improving quality of services to support people with severe and enduring mental illness. This paper explores how a recovery paradigm offers opportunities to better understand how efforts within the personal, clinical, and psychosocial disability domains of well-being relate and need bridging and integration with an evidence-based framework of practice to optimise outcomes. Recovery from a severe and persisting mental illness such as schizophrenia is optimised by a holistic approach integrating the domains of clinical treatment and psychosocial rehabilitation with the personal efforts of individuals. For service providers, a monolithic or single paradigm approach with an exclusive or predominant biological, psychological, social, or cultural focus is unable to offer effective guidance on the treatment and rehabilitation support needed to enable community participation and ameliorate the impact which problems associated with mental illness have on individuals, their families, and their wider communities. Moreover, recovery-oriented services need to be effective, embracing evidence-based policy, practice and service delivery by providing treatment and support which actually work to improve outcomes for consumers and families.
authors.affiliation: Professorial Fellow, School of Public Health, Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, University of Wollongong; Clinical Associate Professor, Brain and Mind Research Institute, Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney; Deputy Commissioner, Mental Health Commission of New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rosen
authors.affiliation: Director MHINDS (Mental Health International Networks for Developing Services); Senior Clinical Psychologist, Consultant Assertive Community Treatment, Western Sydney Local Health District, Australia.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: O'Halloran
mesh_terms: D003156:Community Mental Health Services; D019033:Delivery of Health Care, Integrated; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation / Q000628:therapy*; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic / Q000592:standards; D012074:Remission Induction
keywords: Psychosocial deprivation; Rehabilitation; Therapeutics