Research Paper Ideas

\"Nevertheless, of the 25 who had experienced such self-disclosures, 18 (72%) said that they believed this had had a positive influence on the outcome of their treatment, three (12%) thought that it had had a negative influence and four (16%) noted that it had had no influence. Interest- ingly, the two respondents who reported that a professional had shared with them that they currently suffered with an eating disorder both felt that this had had a positive influence on their treatment outcome\" (304).

Purpose and Meaning in Life: Participants found this to be an essential component of recovery, defined as the \"process of seeking a life outside of the eating disorder and being a participant in the experience of living beyond mere existence\" (8).

De-Identification with the Eating Disorder: Another major component of recovery, this aspect is defined as \"coming to an understanding that the eating disorder is separate from one's identity as a person\" (7).

\"Regarding the difficulty of de-identifying with the eating disorder and closing the door to the eating disorder completely, many of the participants in the current study relayed how the struggle of letting go of their eating disorder corresponded to their current career choice\" (7).

\"While prevalent treatment modalities, based on medical models, often conceptualize health as the absence of symptoms, the perspectives of these therapists suggest that long-term recovery and relapse avoidance requires more comprehensive changes, involving identity, meaning, and purpose in life. Increased focus on these elements throughout the treatment process might lead to higher recovery rates and lower relapse rates than are currently found in the area of eating disorders\" (9).

Context-based approach: a form of a human centered approach, \"which involve people with lived experience of mental illness sharing their personal experiences of illness and recovery, [which] can diminish anxiety, heighten empathy, make personal connections, and improve understanding (263)

Ecological validity: it is related \"to the fact that human action is situated and is contingent on contextual factors/variables,\" suggesting that humans should be studied in \"the richness of their natural environment\" (267)

Human centered design: a \"useful strategy\" for reducing stigma in healthcare, which \"allows for a productive balance of both technical-scientific and humanistic inquiry ... [it is] rather a general methodological orientation encompassing several methods increasingly used within and outside healthcare\" (266) \"Healthcare traditionally uses technical-scientific, reductionist methods to understand and address problems—isolating things to their smallest part and studying them in relative isolation. But these familiar ways may be limited in their ability to fully allow us to understand and address the complex social phenomenon of stigma\" (266).

\"Approaching stigma as a complex social process requires an approach that emphasizes understanding why an individual, group or culture may manifest stigma. This is different than an approach which sees the individual or group as non-compliant, wrong, or somehow not behaving as they 'should'\" (267).

\"[As described by Gast] There is also emerging evidence to suggest that healthcare providers hold different explanatory schemas for different forms of mental illness. This thus presents another important consideration for tackling stigma among healthcare providers, especially if the interest is to target stigma against a particular form of mental illness\" (266).

People want to learn, grow, be healthy, and have rewarding relationships, but psy- chological threat can impede their ability to do so. By helping people to situate threats into a narrative of global adequacy, affirmations turn down the inner alarm of psychological threat.... Less encumbered, people can make better use of the resources for performance and growth in their social environment, in their rela- tionships, and in themselves. (Cohen and Sherman 2014, p. 354)\" (Howell 1)

'Steele outlined key theoretical propositions regarding the process of self-affirmation: First, a threat to self-regard motivates a desire to re-establish one's self-integrity. Second, this takes the form of cognitive or behavioural changes that either directly reduce the psychological threat (e.g., by denying its impor- tance) or that indirectly reduce the threat by reaffirming one's global sense of self (e.g., by bringing creditable aspects of the self to mind). Third, because self-affirmation is not aimed at directly addressing the threat, it can draw upon domains of the self that are entirely unrelated to the domain in which the threat occurred: ''It is the war, not the battle, that orients this system'' (Steele 1988, p. 289). Self-affirmation is therefore characterized as a highly malleable approach to coping with stressful events, in that any estimable aspect of the self can be used to counter a particular self-threatening experience\" (Howell 2)

\"There are several additional benefits of affirming the self under conditions of psychological threat. Cohen and Sherman (2014) describe that self-affirmation may: bolster confidence in handling future encounters with the threatening stimulus; help to clarify purposes in life, including those that transcend the self; foster an approach orientation to threat; ''promote trust, compromise, and closeness'' in interpersonal relationships (p. 352); foster an opti- mistic outlook and openness to challenge; and remind people of their intrinsic aspirations\" (Howell 3).

\"There is evidence that the process of self-affirmation increases behavioural engagement and accom- plishment. In the realm of academic performance, research has amassed to show that students who complete self-affirmation interventions immediately prior to threatening exams perform better than students not completing such interventions (Cohen and Sherman 2014). In the realm of health, a meta-analysis of 41 studies showed that self- affirmation interventions have impacts on health-message acceptance, intentions to change, and health-related behaviour that, though small in terms of conventional effect size cut-offs, are similar in magnitude to other behavioural interventions and are reliable across a range of health-related processes and outcomes (Epton et al. 2015; see also Sweeney and Moyer 2015)\" (Howell 10)

\"Over the last ten years, 11 staff with personal recovery have worked in our program. The included two PhDs, six Masters prepared Licensed Therapists, one RN, and two psychtechs. Overall, these clinicians have made an unusual and outstanding contribution to the program. The fact that we have staff with recovery is consistently mentioned in patient satisfaction surveys as one of the strengths of the program\" (Johnson 295)

\"My experience with recovered staff is that they exude confidence in understanding and dealing directly with the patients' eating disorder symptoms. while offering hope and inspiration that becoming fully recovered is possible. I know know of only two staff members in six years who left Monte Nido due to the fact that they felt 'uncomfortable' and even 'triggered' by the patients\" ( Johnson 296)

\"When patients see recovered clinicians being valued and occupying positions of status within treatment programs, it can be powerful. It can send a message that individuals who have had eating disorders can expose these shame-filled aspects of themselves, master them, and then use the experience to consolidate a more authentic self system that can be valued by others\" (Johnson 297)

\"'recovering' ... implies that people can never be 'recovered.' This idea originates from the addiction of disease model used in Alcoholics Anonymous. In this paradigm eating disorders are thought to be lifelong diseases ... labeling eating disorder patients in this way may not only be a diagnostic trap but a self-fufilling prophecy\" (Johnson 302).

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