13 General introduction Profiles B and C seem logical from a medical perspective, because patients show less symptoms and experience recovery or still have symptoms and experience no recovery. Categories A and D are at first sight less obvious. Why do patients with ongoing symptoms do experience recovery (category A)? And why do patients with remission of symptoms do not feel recovered (category D)? To understand these patients better, qualitative research is needed to ask them if clinical treatment interventions were actually helpful or not to achieve personal recovery. Clinicians may use this knowledge to adapt their practices to stimulate patients’ process of recovery. Figure 1: Conceptual model of four profiles of recovery. Illustration adapted from a figure developed by Penumbra (http://www.penumbra.org.uk) Personal recovery suits us all? Starting from the idea, described above in the definition of Anthony, that personal recovery is universally human, the question arises whether (clinical) factors associated with personal recovery are similar in persons with and without a psychiatric diagnosis. If patients and non-patients share supportive factors of personal recovery, this underscores the hypothesis that recovery transcends illness and this may result in mutual understanding. No earlier research has been done into the possible predictors of personal recovery in the general population. Van der Krieke et al. already found that the usefulness of the Recovery Assessment Scale (RAS) in outcome assessments is questionable, because the differences detected in recovery between service users, siblings, and healthy controls had limited clinical relevance. This indicates that recovery suits us all. 1
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