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Epilogue
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■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Epilogue We began this investigation with the question: “How do the person ’s experiences and activities affect processes of recovery in schizophrenia?” Our qualitative analysis indicated that experiences of being stigmatized and/or rejected by others, as well as those of failing at efforts to accomplish normative life tasks, make recovery more difficult. Being accepted and valued by others, as well as experiences of success, pleasure, and being generative, play important roles in promoting recovery. In addition, withdrawal , isolation, and absorption in idiosyncratic ways of making sense of one’s illness-related experiences make recovery a more remote possibility, while engagement in the world and with others, and struggling to make constructive sense of one’s difficulties, make recovery possible. What these findings suggest is that schizophrenia, in its more severe forms, may be more like a prolonged illness such as type 2 diabetes than an acute condition such as an infection. In this vein, recovery requires more than simply taking medication and waiting for the condition to abate. On the other hand, it appears that psychosis can abate over time, unlike type 1 diabetes and other chronic physical conditions. With appropriate self-care and adequate alterations in one’s daily life, many people will be able to overcome the effects of schizophrenia altogether. To make this statement no more implies that it therefore is the person’s fault that he or she has schizophrenia than it is to imply that people are at fault for having type 2 diabetes. Causation in both conditions is most likely the result of the convergence of numerous factors, many—if not most—of which lie outside of the person’s control. To make this statement does imply, however , that regardless of the nature of the causation involved, for people with schizophrenia to recover they need to be at least one of the heroes of their own story. It is this story, the one in which the person takes center stage as protagonist , that we have tried to elicit, encourage, and attend carefully to as it has unfolded through the words of our participants. It also is this story that we encourage you to join in bringing to light, like the water in Rilke’s poem that reached into “the silence of stone” to recover its hidden gold. Inviting the person to tell his or her story and understanding this story in its own terms not only promise to shed light on processes of recovery in schizophrenia, after all, but also promise to promote recovery. In becoming an autobiographer, the person with psychosis first has to assume the role of a somebody somewhere about whom a story may be told. By bringing his or her story into the public sphere—whether through research or practice—we invite the person to reassume this role as a member of a shared community here, alongside us. Given Husserl’s insight with which we began this volume, namely, that I am treating a fellow human being as a “mere thing” unless I take him or her to be a person as a subject and a member of a shared community, this approach would seem to provide an important starting point for efforts to understand and promote recovery from this most dehumanized, and dehumanizing, of human conditions. Epilogue ❙ 211 [3.230.162.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:47 GMT) ...