Psychiatric rehabilitation interventions: a review

Psychiatric rehabilitation has become accepted by the mental health field as a legitimate field of study and practice. Over the last several decades various psychiatric rehabilitation programme models and procedures have been developed, evaluated and disseminated. At the same time the process of psychiatric rehabilitation has been specified and its underlying values and practitioner technology articulated. This review describes the psychiatric rehabilitation process and in so doing differentiates psychosocial interventions that can be classified as psychiatric rehabilitation interventions from other psychosocial interventions. Furthermore, the major psychiatric rehabilitation interventions are examined within a framework of the psychiatric rehabilitation process with a review of their evidence. The review concludes that psychiatric rehabilitation interventions are currently a mixture of evidence-based practices, promising practices and emerging methods that can be effectively tied together using the psychiatric rehabilitation process framework of helping individuals with serious mental illnesses choose, get and keep valued roles, and together with complementary treatment orientated psychosocial interventions, provide a broad strategy for facilitating recovery.