Book Review: Women With Serious Mental Illness: Gender-Sensitive and Recovery-Oriented Care

An analysis of the most recent wave of the United States National Stigma Studies, which have assessed stigma of mental illness over the past two decades, found that while stigma regarding depression has decreased, stigma levels for schizophrenia have remained stagnant (Pescosolido et al., 2021). Of particular concern, public perception of people with schizophrenia as likely to commit violence has increased. Consequently, renewed efforts to reduce stigma in order to promote greater service use, improved treatment resources, and promotion of public health are critically needed. With their book, Women with Serious Mental Illness: Gender-Sensitive and Recovery-Oriented Care,Mizock and Carr offer a practical resource for improved treatment services for women with serious mental illness (SMI) and optimism for their recovery. Readers may be familiar with the term “recovery” as referring to sobriety, but Mizock and Carr apply the concept more broadly as an approach toward coping with SMI (such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression), referring “to the notion that people can live meaningful and satisfying lives in the face of SMI” (p. 2). Although the American Psychological Association (APA) endorsed the concept of promoting recovery as best practice in addressing SMI two decades ago (APA, 2009), few training resources are available to help therapists and mental health service providers put these concepts into practice. While APA and Jansen’s (2014)Recovery to Practice Curriculumwas a landmark contribution toward this end, Mizock and Carr’s volume adds a feminist framing and extensive discussion of cultural context to current applications. As an introduction, Mizock and Carr offer a history of the mistreatment of women with SMI and how gender influenced understanding of mental health disorders and their treatment. They describe the recovery movement and challenge the pessimistic prognoses often assigned to women with SMI, citing World Health Organization data that found 25–65% of people with SMI experience partial to full recovery. They present the components of recovery and offer many tools for further understanding the concept and how it can be operationalized. Key features offered across the book’s chapters include the following learning tools: engaging case narratives that exemplify women’s experiences and recovery components; clinical applications that model treatment planning and shared decision-making; lists of clinical strategies that could be implemented in assessment, therapy, and advocacy; activities which could be done in classes or independently to promote learning; worksheets which could be used with clients or learners; and discussion questions for reflection or class discussion. A strong feminist contribution of the book is the way in which the contexts of women’s lives and their intersectional identities are acknowledged and presented. The social complexities of poverty, eviction, homelessness, objectification, abuse, and traumatization are addressed, along with the identity components of race/ethnicity, culture, spirituality, and gender. Examples are provided to show how these factors are considered in care planning and how women’s strengths and competencies can be built upon. The conclusion of the book is a summary of the authors’ model for intervention, Women’s Empowerment and RecoveryOriented Care (WE-ROC), which integrates feminist, gender-sensitive, and recovery-oriented concepts into mental health care. This model has been tested in a pilot study, and has not yet been experimentally researched, but was found to be promising. This book would be an outstanding addition to graduate clinical training for professionals in mental health care, nursing, and medical students, and for advanced undergraduates in Women’s Studies, Psychology of Women, and sociology courses. I also recommend it for any faculty teaching Introduction to Psychology or Abnormal Psychology so that recovery concepts can be integrated into those courses. Since stigma is somewhat reduced when a clinical vignette describes a person as being in treatment or recovery (McGinty et al., 2018), Mizock and Carr’s book offers powerful tools not only for enhancement of well-being of persons with SMI, but also toward stigma reduction.