Personal Recovery Profiles in Chinese Carers of Children and Young People With Mental Illness: A CHIME Framework-Based Study

Abstract

While personal recovery is a well-established concept for people with mental illness, its application to carers, who share a similarly demanding journey, remains underexplored. This cross-sectional study firstly applied the CHIME framework (Connectedness, Hope and optimism, Identity, Meaning in life, and Empowerment) to 333 carers of children and young people with mental illness in China, via an online survey from September 2024 and February 2025, and aimed to provide baseline data on personal recovery and its correlates in this population. Carers completed questionnaires on demographic, caregiving and illness-related information, five indicators of personal recovery, and three indicators of psychological wellbeing. Latent profile analysis, descriptive analysis, bivariate analysis, and ordinal logistic regression were conducted using SPSS 26.0 and Mplus 8.3. Three profiles of personal recovery were identified: struggling group (13.2%), progressing group (62.4%), and recovering group (24.3%). Bivariate analyses showed that care recipients' sex, carers' employment, illness duration, and SDQ prosocial, externalising, and internalising domains differed significantly across profiles. Ordinal logistic regression (adjusting for all factors) revealed that carers' sex, care recipients' sex, and SDQ prosocial and internalising domains were independently associated with profile membership. Carers in the struggling group had the poorest psychological wellbeing, followed by the progressing and recovering groups. These findings may help identify carers with poor recovery and inform interventions tailored to profile membership. CHIME-based approaches targeting stigma reduction and enhancement of hope and mastery may be related to better personal recovery and psychological wellbeing in this population.