Practice of Community Vocational Rehabilitation Empowerment for Patients with Mental Disorders <br/>—A Case Study on the “Walking with Love” Project in Y City

Abstract

Exploring the practical path to improve the efficiency of community vocational rehabilitation for patients with mental disorders is of great significance to deal with the practical problems of difficulties in returning to normal society, low employment rate and poor employment stability. Previous research has primarily focused on the technical paths such as biomedical therapy and indigenous healing, while excluding the humanistic path of patients’ empowerment. Through the participatory observation and in-depth interview on the practice of “Walking with Love” project designed based on the theory of social work empowerment, it is found that the four analytical dimensions of perception, participation, interaction and support can be extracted from the three levels of individual empowerment, interpersonal empowerment and social empowerment, which can stimulate the inner beliefs and self-efficacy of rehabilitation, promote their subjective participation and social interaction, and build a social support network. This empowerment process can significantly improve their community vocational rehabilitation effect. The findings further indicate that, perception, participation, interaction and support together constitute social capital, which plays an intermediary role in the process of social work participating in community vocational rehabilitate empowerment. Among them, perception is the core of individual self-empowerment, participation and interaction are the cores of interpersonal empowerment, and social support is the core of social empowerment.