Illness self-management programs like WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Planning) help adults with serious mental illness (SMI) learn and enact autonomous strategies to pursue recovery26. WRAP is a peer-led intervention providing a framework by which people develop personal plans to achieve wellness and pursue recovery goals. Extant research reveals WRAP's success at enhancing participants' hope, quality of life, perceived recovery, and self-advocacy; the magnitude of changes, however, is relatively modest, and participants show no increase in hope for personal ability to develop strategies to reach identified goals11,12,15. The proposed mixed methods investigation seeks to examine how participants learn and utilize WRAP's framework for pursuing recovery, including barriers and facilitators of effective mastery and implementation of WRAP tenets, guided by social cognitive theory. [The research will take place in two phases. Phase one: the trainee will recruit 24 WRAP users to engage in focus groups and 8 WRAP graduates to participate in in-depth interviews to explore the lived experience with WRAP and develop an operational definition of WRAP utilization. Phase two: the trainee will recruit 75 participants accessing WRAP intervention. Pre- and post- measures will quantify 1) problem-solving strategies and 2) social network size, satisfaction, and reciprocal problem-solving supports, and 3) WRAP utilization to investigate correlations with variance in outcomes of perceived recovery, hope, quality of life, and symptom severity. The overall goal of this training grant is to develop the requisite knowledge and skills to 1) effectively research how interventions enable adults with SMI to learn and implement strategies to pursue recovery, and 2) facilitate the long-term goals of the trainee to investigate mediators and moderators of the relationship between WRAP utilization and recovery outcomes and ultimately to develop strategies for augmenting the effectiveness of interventions for adults with SMI.
WRAP is likely the most widely used illness self-management intervention in the United States for adults with serious mental illness (SMI)10, but research is needed to explain the mechanisms through which it effects change and for whom and under what conditions it is most effective. Only then can the modest outcomes of the intervention be enhanced and the audience expanded to enable more people to effectively digest and implement WRAP's framework for pursuing recovery and living self-directed lives. The proposed research project is the first step of a larger research agenda to accomplish such research aims.
