Predictors of Personal Recovery of People with Severe Mental Illness in a Chinese Society: a Cross-Sectional Study with

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Predictors of Personal Recovery of People with Severe Mental Illness in a Chinese Society: a Cross-Sectional Study with a Random Sample Daniel KW Young 1

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& Daphne Cheng & Petrus Ng

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# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract This research study aims to identify the psychosocial factors predicting the personal recovery of people with severe mental illness in a Chinese society. A cross-sectional research design was adopted that involved a random sample of 266 community-dwelling people with severe mental illness in Hong Kong. These individuals were assessed in terms of their personal recovery, self-esteem, and self-stigma by using standardized assessment scales. While personal recovery is related to and/or predicted by various psychosocial factors, the results of hierarchical multiple linear regression analyses showed that self-stigma subscales were significant predictors of personal recovery, while self-worth was the strongest predictor of personal recovery. Thus, it is important to enhance the sense of self-worth and reduce self-stigma of people with severe mental illness to facilitate their personal recovery. Keywords Personal recovery . Self-esteem . Self-stigma . Mental illness In Chinese societies, recent surveys indicate that the 1-year prevalence rate of severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, delusional disorder, brief psychotic disorder, and schizoaffective disorder, varies among Chinese societies and is ranging from 0.5% in mainland China (Long et al. 2014) to 2.9% in Hong Kong (Chang et al. 2015). People with severe mental illness are significantly morae likely to have poorer psychosocial functioning and lower quality of life than those without mental illness (Chang et al. 2015), and many of them are in need of long-term treatment and supportive services. Nevertheless, many people with severe

* Daniel KW Young [email protected] Daphne Cheng [email protected] Petrus Ng [email protected]

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Department of Social Work, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction

mental illness are able to achieve recovery in the long run, i.e., having a mental illness for 15 years or more (Harrison et al. 2001; Calabrese and Corrigan 2005). In fact, recovery has been adopted as an important element of mental health policies in many countries (Pincus et al. 2016). Thus, it is important to facilitate recovery for community-dwelling people with severe mental illness in Chinese societies. Although various concepts and definitions of recovery have been proposed, to date, there is no common consensus on its definition (Bellack 2006; Cavelti et al. 2012; Corrigan and Ralph 2005; Shanks et al. 2013). Generally, the definition and focus of recovery in the literature are either in terms of clinical or personal recovery (Cavelti et al. 2012). Clinical recovery focuses more on symptom alleviation and functional improvement, and various operational definitions of clinical recovery have been proposed (Rodgers e