Understanding personal recovery experiences in Bipolar Disorder
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Understanding personal recovery experiences in Bipolar Disorder
IRAS ID
144262
Contact name
Barbara Mezes
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Lancaster Universiity
Research summary
Personal recovery is distinct from clinical recovery, as the latter focuses solely on symptom reduction. Although coping with symptoms still constitutes an important feature, many individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder do not experience complete clinical recovery. Personal recovery is regarded as more than just symptomatic outcomes; service users emphasize the importance of functional outcomes, such as employment and engagement in meaningful activities. The significance of personal recovery has been recently recognised by the Department for Health (2011), highlighting the importance of considering patients’ experience to improve outcomes of mental health treatments.
The study will involve three phases, each aimed to deepen understanding of personal recovery experiences in bipolar disorder. The first phase will use questionnaires to examine the relationship between bipolar relevant psychological processes, such as reward-related cognitive style, impulsivity, self-appraisal, dysfunctional coping strategies and attitudes, which are proposed to play important roles in course of illness and recovery experiences. This will involve a base-line and a six-month follow up assessment, to detect changes in recovery scores over time. The second phase will explore how individuals experience recovery on a moment to moment basis in their everyday lives and inhibitors and facilitators (such as mood, stress, self-appraisal and response style) of such experiences. This will be reached by using Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), which allows to get an 'in the moment' account of an individuals' subjective experience, and to contextualise this in terms of psychological, social and environmental factors. The third phase will use qualitative interviews to investigate the interplay between factors influencing recovery on a daily basis and over six-month period, and factors, such as meaningful life events that influence changes in recovery experiences. This phase will involve individuals with particularly high or low recovery scores, or with significant changes in recovery, detected in previous phases.REC name
London - Queen Square Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/LO/1170
Date of REC Opinion
7 Aug 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion