Abstract
Adults living with severe mental illness experience a broad spectrum of difficulties, such as visual and olfactory hallucinations, internal dialogue or hearing voices, depression, anxiety, homelessness, substance use, and difficulty managing daily activities and relationships. The Illness Management and Recovery curriculum has been revealed to be a useful evidence-based practice or approach to working with individuals with severe mental illness. The Illness Management and Recovery workbook promotes symptom management in adults by creating a vision and following a step-by-step problem solving process. This recovery model is tailor to the individual and requires their input on a step-by-step path to recovery. However, little research has been done to explore the barriers for practitioners when implementing Illness Management and Recovery with adults with severe mental illness. This study investigated the practitioner’s barriers of using Illness Management and Recovery with individuals living with severe mental illness. By conducting a semi-structured interview with a mental health practitioners that specializes in utilizing IMR when working with individuals seeking recovery from a mental health diagnosis. Five major themes emerged from this data analysis: 1.training and supervision, 2. initiating mental health services with IMR, 3. practitioner and client engagement strategies, 4. the role of the practitioner, and 5. organizational support. The findings act as support to previous findings regarding Illness Management and Recovery. However, the findings also relate the barriers directly to the successful recovery of adults that have experienced severe mental illness and point to the need for continued efforts to provide effective training and supervision to practitioners in a national capacity.