More Fundamentally Human than Otherwise

Abstract

Beal and her colleagues are to be commended, and congratulated, for venturing forth in exploring the everyday experiences of people with serious mental illnesses as they go about meeting the challenges of establishing lives for themselves in the community following extended inpatient care. As community integration increasingly becomes the goal of community mental health services, the relatively uncharted territory of how people with severe and persistent mental illness navigate their immediate social environments becomes both a timely and important focus for empirical study. The contribution of Beal and her colleagues advances a growing body of research in this area describing various processes involved in the person’s efforts to manage his or her psychiatric condition as he or she goes about trying to reclaim his or her life. In addition to those references cited in Beal et al.’s paper, this body of research includes work by Barham (1992, and with Hayward, 1998), Corin (1990, 1998, and with Lauzon, 1992, 1994), Davidson and colleagues (1992, 1995, 1997, 2001, 2001, 2003; Sells, 2004), Estroff (1989, 1994, 1995a, 1995b), Lovell (1997), Ridgway (2001), and others. I would like, briefly, to consider the specific contribution of Beal and her colleagues within this broader context. Several of the findings of this study are noteworthy. First, the investigators note that people with schizophrenia need to “venture forth” into the world in order to “connect” to others, even though at times these others may be virtual or delusional in nature. Second, they describe ways in which environmental factors, activities, objects, and past experiences may be used to facilitate these processes of venturing forth and connecting, as well as some ways in which they might impede these processes. Finally, they recognize that the processes they have identified and described in the lives of people with schizophrenia being discharged from long–term inpatient care “should be seen as relatively normal ones and as part of the struggle we all face in living in the world together.” In other words, people with schizophrenia appear to engage in the same strategies for navigating community life that the rest of us (i.e., those of us who do not have schizophrenia) engage in when we find ourselves in similar circumstances (e.g., being newly relocated or visiting a foreign country for the first time). Although the investigators present their findings in this order, we would like to reverse their order of consideration in Psychiatry 68(3) Fall 2005 243