Recovery
In mental health, the word ‘recovery’ has two meanings, clinical recovery and personal recovery.
Clinical Recovery – when someone ‘recovers’ from the illness and no longer experiences its symptoms.
Personal Recovery – recovering a life worth living (without necessarily having a clinical recovery). It is about building a life that is satisfying, fulfilling, and enjoyable.
Personal Recovery
Personal recovery is “(a) deeply personal, unique process of changing one’s attitudes, values, feelings, goals, skills and/or roles. It is a way of living a satisfying, hopeful, and contributing life even with limitations caused by the illness. Recovery involves the development of new meaning and purpose in one’s life as one grows beyond the catastrophic effects of mental illness (Anthony, 1993, p. 527).”
CHIME Recovery Framework
Researchers at Kings College (UK) identified 5 components that make up the recovery process – Connectedness, Hope and optimism, Identity, Meaning and purpose, and Empowerment, providing the acronym CHIME.
Leamy, Bird, Le Boutillier, Williams & Slade, 2011
Recovery and Spirituality
Many people living with mental illness find personal spirituality (religious and non-religious) important for their recovery since spirituality is used to manage and cope with the symptoms, consequences, and suffering of mental illness.
There are common themes of meaning, purpose, connection, and hope across recovery and spirituality.
While personal recovery refers to the development of new meaning and purpose in one’s life (Anthony, 1993), spirituality gives “meaning and direction to a person’s life and helps them deal with the vicissitudes [ups and downs] of existence (Swinton & Pattison, 2001, p. 24).”
Spaniol (2002) defines recovery as “a spiritual journey by which people with psychiatric disabilities rebuild and further develop their connectedness to themselves, to others, to their living, learning, and working environments, and to larger meaning and purpose (p. 332).”
MISTIC Spirituality Framework
The University of Nottingham led by Katja Milner explored “the experiences of spirituality among adults with mental health difficulties” in published qualitative research (Milner, Crawford, Edgley, Hare Duke & Slade, 2020). They identified six key themes: Meaning-making, Identity, Service-provision, Talk about it, Interaction with symptoms, and Coping, giving the acronym MISTIC.
Not only was there evidence of “the significant role spirituality plays in the lives of many people who experience mental health difficulties” and the necessity of “health providers to understand and address people’s spiritual needs as part of an integrated holistic approach towards care (p.1.).” They identified the overlap and “amplificatory force” between recovery and spirituality (CHIME and MISTIC frameworks), especially in relation to meaning and identity.
As stated, “this marks relatedness between the concepts of spirituality and recovery, often defined in relation to finding meaning and purpose in life (p.7).”
Resources
MISTIC toolkit for general wellbeing found here.
MISTIC resource for mental health clinicians, practitioners and therapists found here.
Spirituality Lab
Spirituality Lab is a spirituality and mental health research laboratory focused on translational research, turning positive research into recovery-oriented practice in public and non-government community mental health services, and more generally.
More information here
References
Anthony W (1993) Recovery from mental illness: the guiding vision of the mental health system in the 1990s, Psychosocial Rehabilitation Journal, 16(4), 11-23. here
Leamy, M., Bird, V., Le Boutillier, C., Williams, J., & Slade, M. (2011). Conceptual framework for personal recovery in mental health: systematic review and narrative synthesis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 199(6), 445-452. here
Milner K, Crawford P, Edgley A, Hare Duke L, Slade M (2020) The experiences of spirituality among adults with mental health difficulties: a qualitative systematic review, Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 29, e34. here
Puchalski CM, Ferrell B, Virani R, Otis-Green S, Baird P, Bull J, Chochinov H, Handzo G, Nelson-Becker H, Prince-Paul M, Pugliese K, Sulmasy D: Improving the quality of spiritual care as a dimension of palliative care: The report of the consensus conference. J Palliat Med 2009:12:885–904. here
Swinton, J., & Pattison, S. (2001). Spirituality. Come all ye faithful. The Health Service Journal, 111(5786), 24-25. here