Abstract
People with psychiatric disabilities experience significant impairment in fulfilling major life roles due to the severity of their mental illness. Recovery for people with serious mental illness (SMI) can be a long, arduous process impacted by various biological, functional, sociological, and psychological factors that can present as barriers and/or facilitators. The purposes of this study were to (a) investigate the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) framework’s ability to predict recovery in adults with SMI and (b) determine to what extent the ICF constructs in the empirical model explain the variance in recovery. Participants (N = 192) completed a sociodemographic questionnaire and various measures representing all predictor and outcome variables. Results from hierarchical regression analysis with six sets of predictors entered sequentially (1 = personal factors-demographics, 2 = body functions-mental, 3 = activity-capacity, 4 = environmental factors, 5 = personal factors-characteristics, and 6 = participation-performance) accounted for 75% (large effect) of the variance in recovery. Controlling for all factors, by order of salience, the factors found to significantly predict recovery were higher levels of significant other support, education, executive function impairment, and social self-efficacy; primary, non-bipolar SMI diagnosis; greater resilience; lower levels of explicit memory-health impairment, affective self-stigma, and cognitive self-stigma; being younger; fewer self-care limitations; less severe psychiatric symptoms; and being unemployed and unmarried. Findings support the validation of the ICF framework as a biopsychosocial recovery model and the use of this model in the development of effective recovery-oriented interventions for adults with SMI. Clinical and research implications are discussed.
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