Moving toward recovery within clients' personal narratives: directions for a recovery-focused therapy

Recent literature emphasizes that recovery from schizophrenia involves recovery within one's own narrative of an integral sense of identity, agency, social connection, and worth. While this is intuitively appealing and consistent with a wide range of literature, it raises the issue of how to best help people do this in individual psychotherapy. In this article, we explore how psychotherapy might help people construct new narratives or storied understandings of their lives and thereby promote recovery from schizophrenia. Exemplified with two individual examples, we first discuss the barriers that challenge and the techniques that help psychotherapists seeking to enter into dialogue with people with severe mental illness. We also offer a theoretical model of how the revitalization of dialogues within therapy can be conceptualized as a process that promotes recovery and discuss the objective measurement of such outcomes.