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The Relationship Between Personal Recovery and Experienced Loneliness, Discrimination or Neighborhood Unsafety in
Auke Jelsma1, Marieke van der Pluijm1,2, Menno Segeren3
1Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Background:
Personal recovery for patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) is a process of finding meaning in life after being confronted with psychiatric symptoms. Currently, not much is known about the impact of patients' living environments and social interactions. The relationships between personal recovery and experiences of loneliness, discrimination and unsafety remain scarcely explored for patients with SSD. Understanding these relationships may contribute to developing recovery-supportive treatment strategies and improve collaboration between medical and social services. The current study aimed to examine the relationships between personal recovery and experiences of loneliness, discrimination, or neighborhood unsafety in patients with SSD receiving outpatient treatment.
Methods:
Hierarchical regression analyses were performed in 204 patients to assess the explained variance in personal recovery by loneliness, discrimination and neighborhood unsafety, after adjusting for a priori defined covariates. The potential interaction effects of symptom severity with the three predictors were also investigated.
Results:
Loneliness explained 9.6% additional variance in personal recovery (β = -.34, p < .001). Subjective unsafety contributed modestly by explaining 2.8% (β = -.17, p = .012) of additional variance in personal recovery, while severity of unsafety did not contribute. Discrimination did not significantly explain additional variance in personal recovery. No significant interaction effects between symptom severity and the three predictors were observed in the associations.
Conclusion:
Current findings demonstrate a negative association between loneliness and personal recovery in patients with SSD, while subjective unsafety was modestly negatively associated with personal recovery. Addressing loneliness deserves special attention in mental healthcare and social services, highlighting the need for close collaboration between these domains.
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