Reviewing Illness Self-Management Programs: A Selection Guide for Consumers, Practitioners, and Administrators

Illness self-management (ISM) programs for adults with serious mental illness offer strategies to increase self-directed recovery activities to maximize wellness and increase independence from the service delivery system. This article describes five of the most popular ISM programs: Pathways to Recovery, The Recovery Workbook, Building Recovery of Individual Dreams and Goals through Education and Support, Wellness and Recovery Action Planning, and Illness Management and Recovery. It provides guidance for administrators, practitioners, and consumers for the purposes of selecting the program or programs providing the best fit. The framework for describing the five programs encompasses four contextual domains that supplement empirical evidence for a more comprehensive evaluation: structure, value orientation toward recovery, methods of teaching, and educational content. Contextual domains distinguish programs from one another, including length and time commitment, requisite resources, inclusion of group support, utilization of medical language and pathology, degree of traditional didactic education, and prioritization of consumer-driven self-exploration. The authors also searched PsycINFO, Google Scholar, and Cochrane Reviews for empirical evidence and evaluated the five programs on the strength of the evidence and the effectiveness of the intervention. Evidence of program effectiveness was found to range from low to moderate. However, empirical evidence alone is insufficient for selecting among the five programs, and contextual domains may offer the most relevant guidance by matching program features with goals of consumers, practitioners, and administrators.