The Impact of Severe Mental Illness
This new understanding of the importance of a comprehensive, community-based service system is based on a more thorough and clear understanding of that system’s clients.
The field of psychiatric rehabilitation, with its emphasis on treating the consequences of the illness rather than just the illness per se, has helped bring to this new service system configuration a more complete understanding of the total impact of severe mental illness. The psychiatric rehabilitation field relied on the World Health Organization’s 1980 classifi-
Recovery…the Guiding Vision in the 1990s 523 cation of the consequences of disease to provide the conceptual framework for describing the impact of severe mental illness (Frey, 1984).
This new understanding of the importance of a comprehensive, community-based service system is based on a more thorough and clear understanding of that system’s clients.
The field of psychiatric rehabilitation, with its emphasis on treating the consequences of the illness rather than just the illness per se, has helped bring to this new service system configuration a more complete understanding of the total impact of severe mental illness. The psychiatric rehabilitation field relied on the World Health Organization’s 1980 classifi-
Recovery…the Guiding Vision in the 1990s 523 cation of the consequences of disease to provide the conceptual framework for describing the impact of severe mental illness (Frey, 1984).
