Larry Davidson

• Yale University

Purpose To explore clients’ experiences of receiving job support from employment specialists (ESs) working with individual placement and support (IPS) in Norway. IPS is developed to help people with severe mental illness (SMI) into competitive employment as an integral component of mental health services. Methods Using a hermeneutic phenomenologic...

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health problems increased as access to mental health services reduced. Recovery colleges are recovery-focused adult education initiatives delivered by people with professional and lived mental health expertise. Designed to be collaborative and inclusive, they were uniquely positioned to support people...

Objective: Personal recovery refers to a person's pursuit of a full, meaningful life despite the potentially debilitating impact of a mental illness. An evidence base describing personal recovery among people at risk for developing a mental illness is lacking, limiting the potential for mental health services to support personal recovery. To addre...

Narratives describing first‐hand experiences of recovery from mental health problems are widely available. Emerging evidence suggests that engaging with mental health recovery narratives can benefit people experiencing mental health problems, but no randomized controlled trial has been conducted as yet. We developed the Narrative Experiences Online...

The employment of mental health peer support (PS) is recommended in national and international mental health policy, and widely implemented across many countries. The key components of PS remain to be identified. This study aimed to develop a typology of components involved in one-to-one PS for adults in mental health services. A systematised revie...

Objective: The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) recognizes peer support as an underused intervention in suicide prevention. PREVAIL is a peer-based suicide prevention intervention that was designed and piloted with non-veteran patients recently hospitalized for suicidal thoughts or behaviors. The purpose of this study was to elicit veteran and...

Hearing Voices peer support groups allow people to construct understandings of their voices. The groups focus on supporting voice hearers in reducing distress associated with voices through an array of strategies. This study sought to describe the voice management strategies shared in a hearing voices peer support group within a Brazilian public me...

Unlabelled: Person-centered recovery planning (PCRP) has been a key aspect in mental health system transformation and delivering quality health care. Despite the mandate to deliver this practice and a growing evidence base, its implementation and understanding of implementation processes in behavioral health settings remain a challenge. New Englan...

Participatory research denotes the engagement and meaningful involvement of the community of interest across multiple stages of investigation, from design to data collection, analysis, and publication. Traditionally, people with first-hand experience of psychiatric diagnoses, service users, and those living with a psychosocial disability have been...

Despite increased societal focus on structural racism, and its negative impact on health, empirical research within mental health remains limited relative to the magnitude of the problem. The current study—situated within a community-engaged project with members of a predominantly Black and African American church in the northeastern US—collaborati...

Person-centered recovery planning (PCRP) is a collaborative treatment planning practice which aligns with recovery-oriented systems transformation efforts within community psychiatry as well as shared decision-making efforts in medicine as a whole. PCRP is increasingly required by various fiscal and regulatory oversight bodies. These include manage...

No previous studies have investigated how political measures, opinions and views of people with dual diagnoses, organisational requirements and professional values are purposefully communicated, mediated and/or integrated in digital records in mental health care. It remains unclear how health records function as both clinical vehicles for documenta...

Objective: This article describes the findings from a qualitative study conducted in a psychiatric emergency room at the Hospital of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). Two focus groups collect data from people with serious mental illness (SMI) and professionals from hospital-based psychiatric services (HBPS) to explore challenges and oppor...

Citizenship is emerging as one of the world’s leading models to shift mental health care from artificial psychiatric settings into more natural community settings by incorporating human rights. This paper describes a four-session roundtable series entitled Citizenship, Social Justice, and Collective Empowerment: Living Outside Mental Illness. These...

Introduction Multiple stakeholders have recently called for greater research on the barriers to citizenship and community belonging faced by people with mental health challenges. Citizenship has been defined as a person’s access to the rights, roles, responsibilities, resources and relationships that help people feel a sense of belonging. Factors t...

In this presentation I discuss the employment specialist role in IPS and the quality of their support, primarily based on our findings in a recent metaetnograpic study on this topic.

The scarcity of bilingual psychiatrists, as well as appropriate mental health services for populations with limited English proficiency, has led to inequitable health outcomes. A fellowship program was developed, which draws from a clinical model staffed by bilingual (Spanish-English) professionals from racial-ethnic minority groups, to address acc...

Background Since 2015, Norwegian Regional Health Authorities have followed new government policy and gradually implemented medication-free services for patients with psychosis. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore the tension between policy and practice, and how health care workers in Bergen reflect on their role in implementing medicat...

Objective: The experience of personal recovery from mental health has been theorized to occur through several pathways. CHIME is a seminal theoretical framework of personal recovery that is widely endorsed by the existing literature. Few studies have examined the utility of the CHIME framework with those experiencing acute challenges in their enga...

This study sought a clearer understanding of organizational mechanisms reinforcing effective peer employment and organizational change from the perspectives of peer workers, non-peer staff and management in multidisciplinary mental health and substance use recovery services. Findings were used to develop a model for organizational best practice for...

Many people being treated for substance use disorders leave emergency departments (EDs) without being connected to the appropriate care, resulting in increased risk of overdose, death, and recidivism. Providing recovery coaching services in the ED has been identified as a promising strategy to link people to the appropriate follow-up care and suppo...

The Open Dialogue approach was developed in Finland as a form of psychotherapy and a way to organize mental health systems. Open Dialogue has drawn global interest leading to adaptations worldwide, including in Vermont-US where it is called Collaborative Network Approach. Our study aimed to investigate the experiences of families who received Colla...

Objective: People with lived experience of mental illness or distress can help others recover through peer or mutual support. One way they may help others recover is by fostering generativity, which refers to one’s concern for and contributions toward the betterment of others, including future generations (e.g., through caregiving, engaging in civi...

Background Although there has been movement in cardiology to advance patient‐centered approaches to postacute myocardial infarction (AMI) care, work remains to be done in aligning patient preferences with clinical care. Our objective was to characterize patients’ experience of AMI and treatment to develop a new conceptual framework of patient‐cente...

Objective This study explored the benefits and limitations of employing peer support workers, who utilise their own lived experience of mental distress and recovery, to support people experiencing mental distress who are attending the ED. Methods This co-produced qualitative study utilised four phases: (i) assemble a collaborative multi-disciplina...

Purpose To explore and synthesize the views of Supported Employment clients, employment specialists and their supervisors on the core contributions of employment specialists to job support within the mental health field. Methods We systematically searched four databases with no time limitations and identified 16 qualitative studies published betwee...

Objective To develop and test predictive models of discontinuation of behavioral health service use within 12 months in transitional age youth with recent behavioral health service use. Data Sources Administrative claims for Medicaid beneficiaries aged 15–26 years in Connecticut. Study Design We compared the performance of a decision tree, random...

This paper provides a perspective on the recent concept of recovery-oriented systems of care with respect to its origins in the past and its status in the present, prior to considering directions in which such systems might move in the future. Although influential in practice, this concept has yet to be evaluated empirically and has not been the ob...

Background: In this qualitative exploration, we report on a thematic analysis of the key role that engaging in meaningful activities may play in recovery processes for people with a diagnosis of substance use disorder (SUD). Methods: We conducted semi-structured, individual interviews with 30 participants and analyzed the parts of this material tha...

We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology. It is less a question of counting up quotations than of determining and expressing in concrete form this phenomenology for ourselves which has given a number of present-day readers the impression…of recognizing what they had been waiting for. Phenomenology is...

Objective: Qualitative research can shed light on the subjective experiences of individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis, complement quantitative research, broaden our understanding of experiencing CHR, and inform intervention development. The aim of this study was to explore life experiences of individuals at CHR through qualitative...

Substance Use Disorder (SUD) has been recognized as a chronic, relapsing disorder. However, much of existing SUD care remains based in an acute care model that focuses on clinical stabilization and discharge, failing to address the longer-term needs of people in recovery from addiction. The high rates of client’s disengagement and attrition across...

This paper analyzes ten recovery narratives of people with a serious mental illness who received mental health services in the public health care system of the city of Campinas, Brazil. We describe the person's recovery process and their relationship with the clinical services they received. This is a very needed conversation because the incorporat...

Background: The internet enables sharing of narratives about health concerns on a substantial scale, and some digital health narratives have been integrated into digital health interventions. Narratives describing recovery from health problems are a focus of research, including those presented in recorded (eg, invariant) form. No clinical trial ha...

The presence of peer workers in multi-disciplinary environments has rapidly increased in recent years, yet the impact of peer work on other mental health roles is largely unknown. This article explores the presence of peer workers within multi-disciplinary environments, with a specific focus on the possible impact of this presence on the culture of...

Objective: Behavioral health organizations must respond to the needs of increasing numbers of multicultural populations, as the world population continues to diversify. The goal of this research was to develop a measure to assess the multicultural competence of a behavioral health agency using a quick and efficient but comprehensive strategy that u...

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived at the United States, mental health services moved towards using tele-mental health to provide care. A survey about resilience and tele-mental health was developed and conducted with ForLikeMinds’ members and followers. Correlational analysis was used to examine relationships between quantitative variable...

This phase 2 randomized trial examined the outcomes of a brief, transitional, peer support intervention designed to address the poor outcomes that are common for individuals with schizophrenia spectrum illnesses in the period immediately following hospitalization. In the context of treatment-as-usual, participants were provided with a peer support...

The care of people with mental health problems requires health system and service reforms to build up proper mental health care. The challenges of the present moment continue to be immense. The viral pandemic that we are experiencing has exposed the fragility of our health and social services and certified the inequality and precariousness of the l...

Peer support within mental health services has a growing evidence base and aligns with current policies of recovery-oriented care. Despite these advantages, widespread implementation of peer support remains limited, likely due to various methodological and implementation issues. Researchers have noted the importance of utilizing an implementation f...

Background Although poverty associated with severe mental illness (SMI) has been documented in many studies, little long-term evidence of social drift exists. This study aimed to unravel the poverty transitions among persons with SMI in a fast change community in China. Methods Two mental health surveys, using the International Classification of D...

Background Suicide is a leading cause of death in persons with schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses (SMI), however, little is known about the characteristics and circumstances of suicide decedents with SMI in the US compared to those with other or no known mental illness. Methods This study was a retrospective analysis of suicide death...

We have now expended much effort and energy, not to mention pages, to wind our way through the conceptual labyrinth that is the evolution of Husserl’s thought concerning the relationship between phenomenology and psychology. We have arrived at what we take to be his mature and final position on the topic and situate his earlier views as stages on t...

Having presented Husserl’s pre-transcendental position in Chap. 1, we may now turn our attention to his breakthrough to the transcendental and the initial stages of his transcendental period proper. We shall find, however, that this is no simple or straightforward matter. In this chapter, we begin by picking up where we left off in the closing page...

In our last chapter we seemed to have resolved one dilemma only to be faced with several new ones. Initially, we found a way through our impasse with respect to the genetic question of the Logical Investigations by differentiating between natural and philosophical sciences and holding that phenomenology, as a philosophical discipline, would be inte...

In our last chapter we explored a possible solution to the number of problems attendant to applying a phenomenological approach to psychology, only to discover that this solution was apparently unsatisfactory from both a psychological and philosophical perspective. Husserl’s suggestion that phenomenological psychology could operate on a pre-transce...

We have arrived at a complicated position on psychology that appears, at least initially, to resolve satisfactorily the majority of the issues raised thus far. It is a position made possible by Husserl’s legitimization of his earlier pronouncements on the nature of one’s subject matter being partly a result of one’s orientation or interest. When we...

Farber has suggested that Husserl’s works can be grouped, chronologically, into three broadly defined periods: a psychologistic period, a simple descriptive phenomenological period, and a transcendental phenomenological period (1940, p. 11). The psychologistic period consists of Husserl’s earliest writings through the Philosophy of Arithmetic, whil...

In discovering the intentional nature of consciousness and in pursuing the ontological implications of such a view to the further discovery of the transcendental domain as its proper sphere, we have accomplished much, but we have yet to answer many of the questions raised along the way. We are now able to characterize positively what survives the b...

This book shows us how rather than abandoning psychology once he liberated phenomenology from the psychologism of the philosophy of arithmetic, Edmund Husserl remained concerned with the ways in which phenomenology held important implications for a radical reform of psychology throughout his intellectual career. The author fleshes out what such a r...

Purpose: To explore how people with mental illness experience recovery in the Clubhouse context, and which ingredients of the model they find active in promoting recovery. Methods: Hermeneutic–phenomenological design. Individual, semi-structured interviews with 18 Norwegian Clubhouse members. Systematic text condensation was used in analysis. Resul...

Medical rapid response teams, now ubiquitous throughout hospitals, were designed to identify and proactively treat early warning signs of acute medical decompensation. Behavioral emergencies-including clinical psychiatric emergencies, coping/stress reactions, and iatrogenic injuries-are not responded to with the same vigor. At worst, behavioral cri...

This chapter focuses on peer support: when individuals with lived experience of mental illness provide support to others with similar lived experiences. It specifically explores peer support in the behavioral health workforce. It offers a comprehensive overview of peer support by addressing what peer support is, why it is needed, and what it does t...

Several instruments have been developed by clinicians and academics to assess clinical recovery. Based on their life narratives, measurement tools have also been developed and validated through participatory research programs by persons living with mental health problems or illnesses to assess personal recovery. The main objective of this project i...

BACKGROUND The internet enables sharing of narratives about health concerns on a substantial scale, and some digital health narratives have been integrated into digital health interventions. Narratives describing recovery from health problems are a focus of research, including those presented in recorded (eg, invariant) form. No clinical trial has...

The emergence of Covid-19 disrupted most aspects of life, creating a high degree of uncertainty and unpredictability about the future. Knowledge from a place of lived experience offers insights and strategies to better understand how to live, grow and thrive through the difficulties that people who experience mental health challenges, other disabli...

Objective: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has been recognized as causing a wide variety of behavioral health problems. Society must mitigate this impact by recognizing that COVID-19 can trigger people's fears of exacerbating an existing mental illness. A survey about COVID-19 for people with mental illness was developed. Methods: Tw...

The Open Dialogue approach was developed in Finland in the 1980s as a form of psychotherapy and a way to organize mental health systems. It has been adapted and implemented in several countries in recent years. This qualitative study sought to explore staff and developers’ experiences with one adaptation of the Open Dialogue approach in the state o...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore, describe and interpret two research questions: How do persons with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse problems, living in supportive housing, experience belonging? How do residential support staff experience promoting a sense of belonging for persons with co-occurring mental health and su...

Background: In 2016, the Western Norway Regional Health Authority started to integrate more evidence-based psychosocial interventions into the existing mental health care, emphasizing the right for persons with psychosis to choose medication-free treatment. This change emerged from the debate on the effectiveness and adverse effects of the use of...

Background: Recovery from acute myocardial infarction (AMI) has been primarily understood in a narrow medical sense. For patients who survive, secondary prevention focuses largely on enhancing clinical outcomes. As a result, there is a lack of descriptive accounts of patients' experiences after AMI and little is known about how people go about the...

The purpose of the study is to 1) better understand patterns of utilization of Intensive Outpatient Treatment (IOP) Programs and Services in the State of Connecticut by adult Medicaid recipients experiencing a serious mental illness, substance use disorder, or co-occurring disorders; and 2) to determine the relationship between the duration of an I...

Background The period immediately following discharge is highly stressful for many individuals with schizophrenia spectrum illnesses as they transition from protracted inpatient stays to community settings with minimal support. In this period the risk of hospital re-admission is at its highest, many do not engage with community supports and clinica...

Purpose While serious mental illness (SMI) and substance use disorders (SUD) are common, less research has focused on causal beliefs across conditions. This is an important question when trying to understand the experience of dual diagnosis. The purpose of this paper is to examine how three factors representing causal beliefs (biogenetic, psychosoc...

Mental health issues among young people have received increasing attention in Norway as more are diagnosed with and report mental health problems. In this study, we focus on the personal and social recovery processes of young people with mental health difficulties. The aim of the study was to explore how young people and parents experience collabor...

A first episode of psychosis is often a traumatic experience that leads to significant life disruptions. However, many young people recover following a first episode of psychosis. Two types of recovery from psychosis have been described in the literature: clinical recovery (i.e. the resolution of symptoms and resumption of social, occupational or e...

There are increased efforts to improve patient-provider relations and engagement within North American mental health systems. However, it is unclear how these innovations impact care for ethnic minorities, a group that continues to face social and health disparities. This study examined one such engagement innovation-person-centered care planning-t...

Purpose Narratives of recovery have been central to the development of the recovery approach in mental health. However, there has been a lack of clarity around definitions. A recent conceptual framework characterised recovery narratives based on a systematic review and narrative synthesis of existing literature, but was based on a limited sample. T...

To investigate which factors individuals with a psychotic depression experience as preventive of suicide while beeing hospitalized. Semi-structured qualitative interviews with nine inpatients, all hospitalized for a unipolar or bipolar depressive episode with psychosis, were conducted at time of discharge. For analysis we used systematic text conde...

This chapter first distinguishes between two concepts of recovery currently at play in psychiatry, one based on a medical/clinical perspective of complete remission of symptoms and impairments and one based on a personal/experiential perspective of living a meaningful life in the face of an ongoing disability. The findings of a recent meta-analysis...

As recovery-oriented practices have become increasingly embraced around the globe, so has the involvement of people in recovery from mental illness, providing peer supports for persons with serious mental illnesses. In this chapter, we review the meaning and often overlooked long-standing history of peer support in mental health. We also discuss th...

Background: In 2016, Western Norway Regional Health Authority started to integrate more evidence-based psychosocial interventions into existing mental health care, emphasizing the right for persons with psychosis to choose medication-free treatment. This change emerged from the debate on the use of anti-psychotic medication regarding effectiveness...

The aim of the study was to investigate the role of inpatient treatment in the recovery process and explore how patients view hospitalization when looking back after 3 months. The study was developed within a framework of user-involved research; all stages of the research process involved cooperation with service user coresearchers. Fourteen patien...

When considering singing as an everyday creative activity in which people engage, investigations of children singing are more easily found than those of adults singing. Mothers commonly sing to their infants as part of caregiving, for the most part in the intimacy of their homes, perhaps making their creativity less visible to researchers. The purp...

Background: Knowledge construction is a form of communication in which people can work individually or collaboratively. Peer support services have been adopted by the public psychiatric and social welfare service as a regular form of intervention since 2015 in Hong Kong. Peer-based services can help people with bipolar disorder (BD) deal with the...

Over the past 30 years, the Brazilian psychiatric reform, based on the anti-asylum social movement and the psychosocial rehabilitation model of care, transformed radically the country’s system of mental health care. Even though tremendous gains were made, people with serious mental illness continue to have limited access to citizenship. In the Unit...

The period immediately following discharge after inpatient stay for mental illness has been found to be the time of greatest risk for adverse outcomes (e.g., rehospitalization, relapse, suicide). However, the experiences of patients as they transition from the hospital to the community are not well understood. The purpose of the present review was...

Therapist self‐disclosure is one of the most controversial topics in the history of psychotherapy. The controversies reflect some basic discussions regarding the nature of psychotherapy practice. In psychotherapy practice, a particular concern is the interaction between the psychotherapist and the patient. The expert‐patient interaction has been ad...

Background One integral way by which individuals in recovery pursue meaning and productivity in their lives is via employment. Unfortunately, the vast majority of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) who express the desire to work remain unemployed. Families have the potential to play an important role in the domain of supported employment...

Social factors seem to play an important role in people's recovery processes, yet little attention has been given to such aspects in relation to early psychosis. In this study, we explored how young adults with first episode psychosis experienced relationships inside and outside the mental healthcare services related to their early recovery process...

Background: The perceived benefits of drug use are not currently integrated into the treatment of substance use disorder. This omission appears paradoxical and is unsubstantiated by empirical research. As the perceived benefits of drug use are catalysts for drug initiation, relapse and continuous use, increased knowledge about these benefits seems...

Objectives: To lay the groundwork for the arrival of Recovery Mentors (RMs) in some of its multidisciplinary teams, a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) conference was organized in a large public agency in the province of Quebec, Canada. The aim was to come up collectively with recommendations to improve access to recovery-oriented care and...

Background: Norway recently changed national policies in psychiatry emphasizing the right for persons with psychosis to choose medication-free treatment. Long-term anti-psychotic medication is debated, in terms of effectiveness and side effects. New guidelines generate increased treatment options for patients with severe mental illness. Methods: Th...

Youth struggling with mental health issues is a major concern in Norway and other Western countries. As is the increasing rate of youth unemployment combined with high rates of disengagement from education. Rather than receiving support to complete their education or find work, they are often given a psychiatric diagnosis that may camouflage the so...

Objective: Peer services have been identified as a key agent in promoting recovery (both as an outcome and as a process) for people with co-occurring disorders. We attempt to make sense of this connection here by examining public perceptions of recovery and peer services separately for serious mental illness (SMI) and substance use disorder. Two di...

Background: Individuals with psychosis are heavy consumers of social media. It is unknown to what degree measures of social functioning include measures of online social activity. Objective: To examine the inclusion of social media activity in measures of social functioning in psychosis and ultrahigh risk (UHR) for psychosis. Methods: Two independe...

Objective: Recovery from severe mental illnesses (SMI) has been described as an outcome (end state where persons are symptom free) or as a process (despite symptoms, people can pursue life goals). Less clear is whether recovery as a process has credibility in the substance use disorders (SUD) community. We examined how public perceptions and expec...