Public Mental Health: A Capabilities 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 capability 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: The panel presents early results from the research portfolio of an NIMH-funded Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts that applies the capabilities approach to psychiatric disability, bringing an ‘assisted development' perspective to public mental health. These studies use 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 (employment, social affiliation and shelter; community integration; literacy), the recovery potential in Mental Health Court practices, and the utility of capabilities to inform and study innovative user run programs. This presentation provides a brief overview of the framework's utility in assessing opportunities available to people with severe psychiatric disabilities for lives they have reason to value.