Hello,
I would really appreciate any advice or thoughts on my dissertation idea as i am running out of time and havent really even strated yet!!!
I have decided to write my dissertation on Recovery, in adult mental health. I am doing a library based dissertation, and the requirements mean that i have to undertake a literature review, and then following this, identify 6 key pieces of research to critically analyse and then to identify key themes which will then form 3 of my main chapters.
I am struggling to come up with an actual dissertation title, and in fact i am at a bit of a loss as to what the aim of the dissertation is. I want to talk about the concept of recovery in adult mental health (perhaps narrowing this down further to Psychosis, in particular Scizophrenia). I am interested in the extent to which stigma, labelling and discrimination can affect the recovery and there does appear to be quite a lot of literature on this.
Any thoughts, ideas and pointers would be a huge help!!
Thanks!!
Oh and also, i would like to somehow incorportate the changing role of social workers in mental health and how this fits in well with the recovery model values, such as empowerment and self determination!! What does anyone think?? Could this be linked in??
Im keen to keep it as simple as possible because i have a real tendancy to divert in different directions!!!
Have a look at the following as a starting point. You need to decide what you are going to do before you start looking really; its very easy to get side tracked and end up with far too much information.
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/campaigns/fairdeal/whatisfairdeal/discriminationstigma.aspx
I did my dissertation last year on Recovery and the role of the mental health social worker. As others have said, try to focus on one aspect of recovery. There is still little out there on matching social work practice with the Recovery concept.
There are a lot of papers on Recovery and as it is a conceptualisation not a model it is in essence a very subjective subject. I got stuck for a while trying to find 'evidence'.
Maybe its worth starting at the end! What is the recovered state, what do people do to get there and what role can mental health workers do to support the process.
Solution Focussed approaches works well in supporting recovery.
Good luck!
One technique I've found very helpful in preparing a literature review dissertation is a citation grid. So start with a few key papers and try to pick out some key themes, then use those as column headings in a grid and fill in a row for each paper. (ie. You might have one column for outcomes, one for user involvement, one for empowerment, one for a brief description of the study etc.)
This is quite a good set of guidelines on literature reviews.