Phenomenology yesterday, today, and tomorrow: a proposed phenomenological response to the double challenges of contemporary recovery-oriented person-centered mental health care

What Is It Like to Be in Alcohol Addiction Recovery? A Dialectical Phenomenological Analysis

INTRODUCTION

Currently, there is no scientific consensus on the concept of alcohol addiction recovery beyond substance use control. This conceptual issue challenges the implementation of therapeutic strategies and mental health policies that are unrestricted to symptomatic remission. Aiming to contribute to its definition, this study aimed to examine the recovery experience of individuals with alcohol addiction using dialectical phenomenological psychopathology (DPP) as a theoretical and methodological framework.

METHODS

A dialectical phenomenological analysis was conducted through an examination of online interviews with eight Brazilian, São Paulo state citizens who were self-declared to be undergoing alcohol addiction recovery (or who declared that they had completely recovered).

RESULTS

Participants' reports generated eight categories that were subdivided into two groups. The first group indicated experiential elements of recovery, such as changes in self-relation, changes in interpersonal relations, and changes in time relations, giving new meanings to suffering and alcohol use, and recovery as a continuous process. The second group referred to how the participants interpreted recovery according to their worldviews: as a spiritual experience, moral reformation, and mentality change.

CONCLUSION

These categories can be understood through the lens of DPP as a process of change in the subjects' being in the world, characterized by the continued management of their existential imbalances in the dimensions of spatiality, temporality, selfhood, and intersubjectivity. The results are preliminary when it comes to conceptualizing recovery but may help future studies to develop recovery-oriented therapeutic strategies.

"I was very sad, but not depressed": phenomenological differences between adjustment disorder and a major depressive episode

Introduction

Adjustment disorder (AD) is a diagnosis that must be differentiated from major depressive episode (MDE) because of the therapeutic implications. The aim of this study is to understand the experience of patients who in their lifetime have been diagnosed with AD as well as MDE to establish the characteristics of each disorder.

Methods

A descriptive phenomenological approach was used with in-depth interviews to four patients and the method proposed by Colaizzi to understand the experiences and reach the description of both disorders.

Results

Three women and one man, with advanced schooling were interviewed. The participants emphasized the existence of differences that were grouped in: the attribution made by the individual, the theme of cognitions, the variability in the course, the possibility of mood modulation, the syndrome severity, the presence of hopelessness and the perceived course.

Conclusion

Phenomenological differences were found in the subjective experience of MDE and AD. The MDE would be described as an intense state of generalized shutdown of the subject's own life, with little response to events, and the AD, as a dynamic reaction attributed to a stressful event, with high variability in the course of symptoms due to the dependence on such event, with the preserved hope that it will end.