Recovery : indications for the practice of social work oriented to human needs

The research focus of the article - based on Aaron Antonovsky’s sense of coherence - is the analysis of recovery from the perspective of clinical social work. The methodological approach adopted in the study is based on the co-creation of knowledge together with 29 people experienced in deep mental health problems who agreed to participate in the process of intersubjectively defining mental crises, the possibilities of overcoming these and thus the ways of understanding recovery. The results of the study show that the basis of the recovery process is meeting a set of five needs: (1) effectiveness, (2) emotionality, (3) connectedness, (4) coherent identity and (5) affirmation of the past. A certain pool of individual experiences acquired during this process is a source of the formation of internalised beliefs that can be linked by a sense of ‘manageability’ (resulting from the satisfaction of the first three of the aforementioned needs), ‘comprehensibility’ (related to the need for ‘coherent identity’) and ‘meaningfulness’ (related to the need to ‘affirm the past’).