Effectiveness of a program to facilitate recovery for people with long‐term mental illness in Japan

Abstract

Recovery is defined as the process of developing new meaning and purpose in life as one grows beyond the catastrophic effects of mental illness. This study aimed to develop a program to facilitate recovery and examine its effectiveness in a randomized controlled trial. The program was developed with three components that enhance benefit finding, personal meaning, and a sense of happiness. Sixty-three participants with long-term mental illness were randomly allocated to the intervention group (n = 32) or the control group (n = 31). The intervention group attended eight 2-h group sessions, with one held every week. Recovery was assessed at baseline, post-intervention, and at a three-month follow-up. In the per-protocol analysis, after excluding those who dropped out, the intervention group showed significant improvement in recovery compared with the control group (P < 0.05). In the intention-to-treat analysis, a repeated measures analysis of variance did not show any significant intervention effect (time × group) (P > 0.05). The program had the potential to facilitate recovery.

A Meta-Analytic Review of Interventions That Promote Meaning in Life

“…The overall percentage of female participants was 69.3%. The studies’ interventions were grouped into the following 6 categories: mindfulness 15 -23 (9 studies, k = 11), psychotherapy 4,24 -30 (8), narrative 31 -37 (7), psychoeducational 38 -42 (5), prosocial 43,44 (2), and spiritual reminiscence 45,46 (2). Forty-two percent of the studies used active control groups, with the rest utilizing passive or waitlist controls.…”

“…The mindfulness studies with active control groups 16,18,20,21 ( k = 5) had an average effect size (SMD) = 0.165 (CI –0.175 to 0.506), Q = 13.9 (p < .001), while the mindfulness studies with a passive control group 15,17,19,22,23 ( k = 6) had an average effect size (SMD) = 1.565 (CI 0.435 to 2.70), Q = 79.8 (p < .0001). The psychoeducational study with an active control group 38 had an average effect size (SMD) = 0.181 (CI –0.399 to 0.760) Q = 0.0 (p < .0001), the psychoeducational studies with passive control groups 39 -42 (4) had an average effect size (SMD) = 0.829 (CI 0.052 to 1.606), Q = 36.6 (p < .0001). The psychotherapy studies with active control groups 26,28 (2) had an average effect size SMD = 0.220 (CI 0.002 to 0.438), Q = 0.01 (p > .90), the psychotherapy studies with passive control groups 4,24,25,27,29,30 (6) had an average effect size (SMD) = 0.688 (CI 0.430 to 0.947) Q = 8.1 (p < .15).…”

Psychological Transformation by an Intervention to Facilitate Benefit Finding Among People With Chronic Mental Illness in Japan

“…The broader program to promote recovery included two other components focused on enhancing personal meaning and a sense of happiness. More detailed information about the larger program to facilitate recovery has been described elsewhere (Chiba, Miyamoto, Kawakami, & Harada, ). The benefit finding component of that program was developed with reference to the framework for facilitating posttraumatic growth, whose animating features are to strive to understand the person's way of thinking; to listen carefully to the language of crisis and psychological response that the person uses; to label posttraumatic growth; to focus on the struggle rather than the adversity itself; to use group approaches; and to respect and work within the existential framework that the person has developed or is trying to rebuild in the aftermath of the adversity (Tedeschi & Calhoun, ).…”

Reliability and validity of the Japanese version of the INSPIRE measure of staff support for personal recovery in community mental health service users in Japan

“…Therefore, for simple evaluations, we recommend the brief version, and we recommend INSPIRE for more comprehensive evaluations. In Japan, there are previous studies on personal recovery evaluation of service users and recovery knowledge and attitudes of professionals [53][54][55]. Meanwhile, however, the evaluation of the recovery orientation of the service by the service user has not yet been done.…”