Related Changes in Personal Recovery, Benefit Finding, and Sense of Coherence among People with Chronic Mental Illness: A Two-Wave Study

Personal recovery is a process of developing new meaning and purpose in life beyond the catastrophic effects of mental illness. Benefit finding (BF) is conceptualized as finding positive changes or benefits through experiences in adversity. Sense of coherence (SOC) focuses on how people can stay healthy and maintain well-being, even in adversity. This study aimed to examine the relationships among the initial levels and longitudinal changes in personal recovery, BF, and SOC among people with chronic mental illness in Japan. In this longitudinal study, a two-wave self-report questionnaire survey was conducted for service users aged 20 or older with mental illness using convenience sampling method in 2014 and 2015. We applied the Latent Change Score approach. Model fit was evaluated according to the CFI and RMSEA. Among 373 eligible participants at baseline, valid responses in both T1 and T2 from 195 respondents were included in the study (valid response rate = 52.3%). Among them, 65.6% were male, with average age of 45.6. The model of the three constructs at the two time points had good to reasonable fit to the data. The initial levels and changes in personal recovery, BF, and SOC were significantly and positively related to each other.