Autovideography: The Lived Experience of Recovery for Adults with Serious Mental Illness

Abstract

Mental health services have been transforming toward a recovery orientation for more than a decade, yet a robust understanding of recovery eludes many providers, and consensus on a conceptual definition has yet to be reached. This article examines mental health consumers' lived experience of recovery and evaluates the usefulness and comprehensiveness of CHIME, a major framework conceptually defining recovery for adults with serious mental illness. Researchers partnered with a mental health association in a major US city to engage in research with graduates of a recovery and education class for adults diagnosed with serious mental illness. Twelve participants were loaned video cameras and invited to "Tell us about your recovery" through autovideography. Of the 12 participants, six produced videos directly responding to the overall research question and were subsequently included in the present analysis. Data were analyzed thematically, and CHIME adequately represented the major domains presented in consumer videos with two notable modifications: subdomains of "reciprocity" within relationships and "contributing to others" were added to comprehensively represent consumer perspectives about recovery. Adding two subdomains to CHIME more effectively represents consumer narratives about recovery, contributes to the social construction of the personhood of people with serious mental illness, and offers a more robust description of the process of recovery.

Is Film as a Research Tool the Future of Public Health? A Review of Study Designs, Opportunities, and Challenges

“…Film methods facilitated capturing uniquely detailed descriptions of behavior, environment, interactions, sound, space, and movement. In one study, the authors described the power of film to capture what interviews alone could not:Videography is unique in its ability to capture voluminous details and nuances of interactions, events, and settings in real time—all of which can be reviewed multiple times to enable in-depth analysis unmatched by field notes, audio files, or transcripts alone (Petros, Solomon, Linz, DeCesaris, & Hanrahan, 2016, p. 416).…”

“…Videography is unique in its ability to capture voluminous details and nuances of interactions, events, and settings in real time—all of which can be reviewed multiple times to enable in-depth analysis unmatched by field notes, audio files, or transcripts alone (Petros, Solomon, Linz, DeCesaris, & Hanrahan, 2016, p. 416).…”

How is Participating in Suicide Prevention Activities Experienced by Those with Lived and Living Experiences of Suicide in Australia? A Qualitative Study

“…Often these experiences are overlapping. Lived experience involvement has a variety of purposes; for example, the literature identifies that lived experience can both demonstrate why an intervention may or may not be effective or appropriate, as well as how that intervention works in everyday life [ 7 ]. However, in this sample, the most common experience was sharing a lived experience of suicide in a public forum with the perceived expectation that this will better inform audiences of what suicide is, and how suicide is experienced.…”

“…In the Australian context, active participation, where people share about the impacts of their life experiences, has long shaped programs and services in the health system [ 6 ]. Lived experience can both demonstrate why an intervention may or may not be effective or appropriate, as well as how that intervention works in everyday life [ 7 ]. Recently, this same movement has emerged in the suicide prevention sector, with the inclusion of lived experience now viewed as integral to most suicide prevention activities in Australia.…”

Influence of change expectancy and recovery processes on depression severity

“…The CHIME framework has also been validated with consumer focus groups (Bird et al, 2014), and the study concluded that CHIME offered a defensible framework to guide clinical practice and research. Subsequent studies continued to report that CHIME matches consumers' descriptions of recovery (Petros, Solomon, Linz, DeCesaris, & Hanrahan, 2016) and systematic reviews of such descriptions (Stuart, Tansey, & Quayle, 2017). While newer processes have also been proposed in addition to CHIME, the original CHIME set of recovery processes was not challenged.…”