This is the first of a series of blog postings related to my own series of research studies (my doctoral research at Saybrook University; Williams, 2011) of people who have made full and lasting medication-free recoveries after being diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. This is very exciting research because it is one of the few areas within psychological research that remains almost entirely wide open. One reason it is so wide open is that most Westerners don’t believe that such recovery is possible, in spite of significant evidence to the contrary. Since there are some very hopeful findings that have emerged within this research, I want to begin this series of postings by summing up one particularly hopeful aspect of my own research, which is a group of five factors that emerged which are considered to have been the most important factors in my participants’ recovery process. But before looking more closely at these factors, we should back up for a minute… Continue reading →