143 Perspective matters in recovery Table 3: [continued] Professionals This man with intellectual disability and anxiety issues, he calls his whole family nonstop that he’s going to end it. His whole family is going crazy. And so they phone us again: do something. And we are busy finding the right care, but we cannot just keep him from doing that. On not having agency, while the network expects otherwise So I had given him space to experiment with what he wanted. That wasn’t much at first. You can say: you have to do this and you have to do that, but often that makes you lose someone. Many people need their own pace to be able to change. On taking time and leaving agency with the person going through recovery 2.4 Experience of (dis)agreement, struggle or collaboration Persons with severe mental illness I say to this work supervisor at the day activity center, I want you to stay near me because I am afraid if you leave. And she says: “OK, that’s fine.” But after half an hour I say, I want to go home. And she says: “That’s fine. Get in the car and I’ll take you home.” Because they also reassured me, my tasks have expanded, so if the girls come for coffee I will bring them coffee. Experience of collaboration to develop activities Family I kept his financial records for him. And in those psychoses, he sometimes would go to my house to take it with him. As a result, he repeatedly lost things and had to reinvent the wheel more or less. At one point, the institution has arranged for a professional financial administrator to put a little less burden on me. And also to keep it clean. Because there were two things running, the money issue and his mental state of course. And that clashed. Struggle between a family member and a person with severe mental illness over agency over financial administration, upended by professional taking agency. Professionals The both of us, we see the world differently. I do tell him: I don’t have the conviction that you’re someone who’s going to be killed any minute now. So he knows I see it differently. At the same time, I don’t say it’s not true what he says, of course that doesn’t make much sense. And we do agree that he suffers a lot from the fear he has. So we hope that at some point that fear is going to diminish through treatment. I think that’s the reason he keeps visiting, and for feeling safe in conversations, too. Professional on differences and common ground for collaboration with a person with a psychosis I once had to deal with threatening aggression. A client who had to take medication under supervision because of a court order and we suspected him pretending to take it. And I spoke to him about that. And that made him very angry. Then he held his fist in front of my face. Ready to lash out... That, that was quite impressive. Here, the experience of struggle amounted to threatening with aggression Legend: this table provides additional illustrative quotes for main theme 2 (interacting with other members of the triad). The quotes are ordered by subtheme (2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4) and then by perspective (persons with severe mental illness, family and professionals). A caption in bold directly after the quote provides brief clarifying information on the quote. 7
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw