Session Abstract: ‘Public Mental Health: A Capabilites Approach to Social Recovery'

To inform policies and practices that promote recovery – lives worth living in their fullest sense - research must go beyond symptom reduction and service utilization as domains of inquiry. Nobel economist Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach, a framework originally aimed at international development, provides a comprehensive framework to ask questions about how personal capacity, social resources and policy, law and custom interact to provide individuals with a set of opportunities they can act on to do and be what they value. Community participation – a key principle in the capabilities approach – here refers to people with psychiatric disabilities. Rationale: Papers here present early results from the research portfolio of an NIMH-funded Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts that applies “Capabilities” to psychiatric disability, bringing an ‘assisted development' perspective to public mental health. Studies used a participatory model to implement methodologies that include multivariate analysis of available national data sets, individual interviews and quasi-ethnography to ask questions about key functionings for persons with psychiatric disabilities. Papers include: 1) Public Mental Health: A Capabilities Approach to Social Recovery (Alexander, Hopper, Jones); 2) Disparities in Well-Being experienced by Americans with Psychiatric Conditions (Vick, Jones, Mitra, Alexander); 3) MH Courts' Potential for Promoting Recovery (Koerner, Pratt Yanos); 4) The Meaning of Literacy for People with Psychiatric Disability (Lincoln, Wallace, Doran); 5) Real Opportunities for Community Integration for MH Consumers Living in Independent Housing (Stefancic, Yanos, Tsemberis); 6) Partners in Recovery: An Ongoing Ethnographic Study of Peer-Run MH Services (Healion, Lewis, Hopper).