Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
This website shares the findings from my narrative inquiry research into the experience of personal recovery from persistent pain.
What is personal recovery?
Personal recovery has at its heart a reconceptualization of recovery as a personal process of learning how to live and how to live well with or without enduring symptoms or vulnerabilities. It is concerned with gaining hope, meaning, purpose, choice and control over patterns of living valued by the person themselves.1
Because personal recovery is not a commonly used term, my recruitment materials for this research used the language of “doing better” or “living well with pain.” The image below is the top half of my recruitment poster.
This research captures the experiences of 10 different people who lived with persistent pain for a year or more and now identify as “doing better” or “living well with pain.” You can read each of their stories on this website.
You can also click here to visit Theses Canada and download the full thesis document.
- Roberts, G., & Boardman, J. (2013). Understanding “recovery.” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 19(6), 400–409. https://doi.org/10.1192/apt.bp.112.010355 ↩︎