Broadening understanding of individual choices about psychiatric medication use in psychiatric rehabilitation

Most individuals in recovery are likely to attempt discontinuing their prescribed medication at least once. The collection of articles in this special issue uses research with quantitative and qualitative methods, reviews of the literature, conceptualization of theory, and first-person accounts from various perspectives to begin to shift the field of psychiatric rehabilitation from a narrow focus on symptom reduction and a fear-driven emphasis on medication adherence to a new perspective in which dilemmas and strong feelings about medication use are commonplace. We issue a call to action for training psychiatric rehabilitation practitioners, who often have the most direct and frequent interactions with people in recovery, to explore their clients’ experiences with using medication and its impact on a range of life domains. Rehabilitation, recovery, and medication have ongoing mutual influences and require an inclusive, multidimensional framework that integrates complex ongoing interactions between personal, societal, and biological processes and assures that treatment decisions are in alignment with recovery goals.