ABSTRACT
Emerging evidence from studies on the subjective experience of recovery from psychosis indicates that mental health services need to move beyond seeking to reduce symptoms or promote skill acquisition. Wellness, as it is increasingly defined in terms of mental health, recognizes that services need to take into account the sense people make of the challenges they face and any resultant decisions about how they should best respond to these. Services are thus needed to support sense-making, including the ability to reflect upon and form an evolving and adaptive sense of oneself and one’s place in the larger human community. In line with this, several different approaches to recovery-oriented psychotherapy and psychosocial rehabilitation are currently being developed for persons diagnosed with psychosis. Many of these approaches explicitly, or implicitly, use the terms metacognition, or mentalization, to describe the processes they target, in order to enable persons to form more integrated and diverse senses of self and others which would promote recovery. In this chapter we offer an introduction to an edited volume which not only presents a range of these kinds of therapies but also illustrates their potential to be useful in creating change and enhancing recovery for persons with a range of very different goals, abilities and challenges. To prepare the reader, we offer a description of the nature and evolution of the terms metacognition and mentalization, and discuss their theoretical links with health.
