Using Qualitative Research to Inform Mental Health Policy

Abstract

To the people of Canada, I say welcome us into society as full partners. We are not to be feared or pitied. Remember, we are your mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, your friends, co-workers, and children. Join hands with us and travel together with us on our road to recovery. 1, p xxi Q ualitative research is not new to psychiatry. Classic texts of the institutional era, such as Stanton and Schwartz's The Mental Hospital, 2 Caudill's The Psychiatric Hospital as a Small Society, 3 and Goffman's Asylums 4 all made ample use of ethnographic methods including participant observation. Estroff introduced these methods into community psychiatry in the 1970s through her ethnographic study of an early Program for Assertive Community Treatment Team in Madison, Wisconsin, resulting in her equally groundbreaking book Making it Crazy. 5 By the end of the 1980s, she had joined forces with Strauss to coedit a special issue of Schizophrenia Bulletin devoted to qualitative methods and investigations of the subjective experiences of people with serious mental illnesses, in which they issued a call for systematic research to be carried out in this crucial area. 6 In addition to

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“Mad, Sick, Head Nuh Good”: Mental Illness Stigma in Jamaican Communities

“…We hoped to elicit information that would not only improve our understanding of such attitudes, but could also be used to inform the development of culturally appropriate education and antistigma campaigns, as well as policy recommendations grounded in empirical research and the lived experience of Jamaicans. In light of the limited research on stigma in Jamaica, we chose to employ a qualitative approach which would allow us to explore in depth subjective understandings of stigma and attitudes toward mental illness in the everyday lives of participants (Camic, Rhodes, & Yardley, 2003;Davidson, Ridgway, Kidd, Topor, & Borg, 2008;Whitley, 2007). The focus group technique allowed for an interaction between participants that contributed to the richness of the discourse.…”

Posttraumatic Reactions to Psychosis: A Qualitative Analysis

“…Qualitative research methods are a promising strategy for understanding subjective experience and offering suggestions for potentially useful treatment approaches (42, 50, 51). However, few qualitative inquiries have investigated the subjective experiences of reactions toward psychosis and its treatment.…”