Someone recently asked me what this decade should be. Creating positive psychosocial experiences and reframing negative life experiences remain the staple of psychiatric rehabilitation practice and research. The person is the critical player when it comes to interpreting one's own life experiences, and rehabilitation concepts such as readiness, goal setting, implementing goals, collaboration, support, acting in one's own interest, and hope speak to the province of the person. Also, processes of the person's mind, such as thinking, perceiving, willing, judging, and reasoning, play an important role in achieving rehabilitation outcomes. It is these concepts of the person as a whole that lead toward outcomes such as self-efficacy and empowerment.
Psychiatric rehabilitation deals with the person in an environmental context.
The focus of change is as much or more on the environment than it is on the person. Our noble pursuit to understand the functioning of the brain must not divert our attention from the equally important task of understanding the workings of the person as a whole. When the appeal of studying brain-behavior relationships becomes too reductionistic and singular in its petition to scientific objectivity, it seems in more ways than one a mindless pursuit. We seem to have forgotten the power of the person to impact not only his or her brain but also his or her ability to learn, develop, and recover. Confidence in the scientific method and in rational thinking replaced all other safeguards of the human mind.