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The Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts, a research center funded by a 5-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was established in 2007 to conduct research that improves the lives of people with severe mental illness through the application of the Capabilities Framework to psychiatric disability.
The Center to Study Recovery uses community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods to construct the conceptual frameworks, tools of inquiry, investigator expertise and stakeholder partnerships to support a comprehensive research agenda on recovery for persons with severe psychiatric disabilities.
Capabilities and Recovery
Conventional psychiatric research has focused on categorizing mental disorders, characterizing and counting those afflicted, and developing interventions to ameliorate symptoms and provide protective living arrangements. A major concern has been to safeguard patients and others from harm. Empirical evidence of long-term improvement, along with the insistent voices of service users, families and advocates, have pushed public mental health to broaden its mission, to incorporate the notion of recovery for people with severe mental illness. But like culture, recovery is a "noun of process", requiring the active engagement of subjects. And on this front, persons with psychiatric disorders encounter substantial barriers, both in treatment and in everyday life. The consistent pattern of social interactions where people repeatedly experience failure - "social defeat"- actively perpetuates disability.
The Center takes recovery from psychiatric disability to mean "the process in which people are able to live, work, learn and participate fully in their communities," a formulation that defines recovery in terms of real opportunities and emphasizes its social character. Substantively, Center participants are adapting and applying Sen's Capabilities Framework to questions of well-being, agency and social inclusion for this population. Procedurally, we embed this work in a committed, participatory, interdisciplinary research approach that includes service users, providers and policy makers in the development and implementation of its research portfolio.
Our long-range goal is to build the intellectual, practice and stakeholder capacity to develop a research portfolio focused on strategies that promote recovery across social contexts for people with severe mental illness.
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