Altered Self-Experience and Goal Setting in Severe Mental Illness

Goal setting is an essential part of psychiatric rehabilitation. Clinicians strive to maximize consumers’ participate in treatment decisions, including setting goals for treatment. Many psychiatric disabilities include alterations in a typical “open” dialogical self-experience that include cacophonous, monological, or barren self-experiences. Alterations to self-experience may affect the ability to formulate authentic and meaningful goals, and these perturbations may vary depending on the type of self-experience. The authors analyzed interviews regarding goals for treatment to explore themes emerging within self-experience types. Themes indicate people with differing self-experiences differ in how they form goals and the barriers they face in this process.