Psychosocial rehabilitation: approach of choice for those with serious mental illnesses.

Walter E. Penk, PhD, ABPP We begin by thanking the Editor of the Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development (JRRD) for commissioning a special issue on psychosocial rehabilitation (PSR) for persons with serious mental illnesses. For many years, the conventional wisdom in the field of mental health has been that serious mental illnesses result in inevitable deterioration. Professional practice has therefore focused on managing psychopathology and its symptoms. A wider variety of outcomes has been identified as critical over the past 30 years, however, particularly for individuals with schizophrenia [1–4]. These outcomes include regaining functioning over the long term, developing friendships, and living satisfying lives [5–9]. Thirty years of empirical evidence, as well as first-person accounts [10–13], support the notion that recovery from serious mental illnesses is possible. As a result, governments in several countries have convened expert panels to review the evidence and recommend policy about the kinds of services that are best for those with serious mental illnesses. In the United States, the three most widely recognized of these are the 1999 report of the Surgeon General on mental health [14], the recommendations of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health [15], and the Institute of Medicine’s report on mental health and substance abuse [16]. The single most potent recommendation is to introduce a vision of recovery into the mental health system, a vision based on the accumulated evidence of what is possible. The result is that nothing less than recovery from serious mental illnesses has become the guiding force behind policies and practices in many U.S. Federal and state mental health systems, as well as those of other countries such as Canada and New Zealand [15,17–19].*