ABSTRACT
In this volume, the collected chapters have described approaches to the treatment of psychosis that have shifted their focus from symptom reduction and skill acquisition to helping persons make their own sense of the challenges they face and how to manage them. While many different approaches have been presented, we suggest that these chapters offer much more than just new concrete ways to intervene. Taken as a whole, they offer at least three insights into how mental health services can directly promote some of the most subjective aspects of personal recovery, namely those related to reclamation of a coherent sense of self. First, the work in this volume illustrates how treatment may promote the integration of embodied, cognitive and affective experience, resulting in a larger and less fragmented sense of oneself and other. With this larger, less fragmented sense of self, the recovering person can have immediately available to them more effective ways to direct their own recovery and act as agents in the world. Second, the mechanism by which treatments may lead to greater integration is necessarily, in part, intersubjective. Meaning made in therapy, regardless of the approach described in each chapter, is jointly made by the diagnosed persons and the clinician. Finally, this work has revealed the neglected complexities of trying to measure outcome. In so doing, it has called for future research to develop ways to take meaning and meaning making into account when trying to understand how the life of someone diagnosed with psychosis is unfolding.
