The Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine (IJPM) invites submissions for the upcoming special issue on Recovery. 

The deadline for submission is Sunday, 30 June 2024.

Review the call for papers below or download the PDF here.

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Guest Editors:

Donal O’Keeffe, PhD (Mental Health Ireland and ARCHES Recovery College); Calvin Swords, PhD (Maynooth University); Michael Norton, BSc (Health Service Executive and University College Cork); Brian O’Donoghue, MRCPsych, PhD (University College Dublin and Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland); Gerald Jordan, PhD (University of Birmingham); and Shannon Pagdon, BA (University of Pittsburgh).

The recovery approach has emerged in the last few decades as a cornerstone of modern mental health policy globally. Today, its aim is to evolve mental health services by considering user and family member, carer, and supporter perspectives and achieving outcomes related to their priorities. The recovery approach also promotes human rights, including equality, non-discrimination, legal capacity, informed consent, and community inclusion. 

Recovery oriented mental health services involve clinicians: 

• Holding optimism for recovery for all.
• Developing relationships with service users centred on the principles of honesty, openness, compassion, and trust.
• Focusing on empowerment, collaborative decision making, self-determination, choice, and the ‘dignity of risk’ and ‘right to fail’.
• Emphasising strengths and resilience rather than perceived ‘deficits’.
• Prioritising access, engagement, continuity of care, and co-produced, service user led services.
• Contributing to tackling social, political, and economic barriers in mental healthcare.

While the recovery approach has undoubtedly led to improvements in the quality of mental health care worldwide, in recent years it has been critiqued extensively. Some key concerns include: the concept of ‘recovery’ becoming professionalised and colonised to make services more acceptable and competitive, detaching it from service user perspectives; people with severe and enduring mental health difficulties experiencing abandonment to the recovery approach; its lack of transferability to non-westernised cultures that do not emphasise individualism and personal responsibility; and its lack of focus on the interpersonal contexts of recovery. 

This is a call for submission of papers to be considered for a themed recovery issue in IJPM. The aim of this issue is to address the problem of determining how mental health services can best implement recovery values and principles in the real world, with consideration given to addressing its deficits, and an emphasis on translating policy into practice. 

We are soliciting data driven original studies, reviews of all types (e.g., narrative, systematic), perspective papers – from any discipline/lived experience perspective – that explore the question of how the recovery approach can best be implemented in the future. These include, but are not limited to the following: 

• Theoretical or conceptual frameworks of recovery, the recovery approach, service user/supporter involvement, or co-production in mental health.
• Appraisals of the prevalence and predictors of recovery in specific populations, or the relationship between recovery and other mental health constructs. 
• Examinations of how recovery values and principles can be operationalised in interventions or initiatives.
• Analyses of attitudes towards, facilitators of, and challenges to, adopting a recovery orientation.
• Explorations of the perspectives of service users, family members, carers, supporters, and clinicians.
• Investigations into the experience and efficacy of adopting a recovery orientation (or implementing service user and supporter involvement or co-production) in mental health research and service delivery.
• Assessments of the feasibility or efficacy of interventions focused on recovery, involvement, or co-production.
• Ethical issues in the scientific study of recovery, service user, family member, carer, or supporter involvement, or co-production.

We are also soliciting first person accounts and perspective pieces from academics or non-academics (who have had their work reviewed by an academic before submitting), including:

• Thoughtful discussions on the recovery approach, its origins, and its future.
• Reflections on the experience of using or providing recovery oriented mental health services.
• Considerations of how clinicians can best strike the balance between demonstrating empathy/respecting emotion and building their own resilience/maintaining boundaries.

The purpose of academic input for non-academic authors is to ensure that manuscripts submitted are written in a scientific style and that they consider the current recovery literature. Please contact the editorial office if you need support identifying an academic to provide this review. All manuscripts submitted undergo a rigorous peer review process before a decision is made about their acceptance for publication.

This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Diarmaid Ring, who made a vital contribution to College of Psychiatrists of Ireland’s Recovery Experience Forum of Carers and Users of Services (REFOCUS). The aim of REFOCUS is to identify ways to improve mental health services by informing and influencing psychiatry training in Ireland. 

Submissions to the IJPM can be made via ScholarOne here. 

Author instructions for submitting to the IJPM are available here. 

If you are unfamiliar with ScholarOne or have any questions, please contact IJPM Editorial Administrator Ian Rice by reply to this email or at [email protected]. Please contact Dr Donal O’Keeffe for any queries you have about the suitability of manuscripts for this special issue via email: [email protected]