Table 3 Quotations to illustrate functional and personal recovery related outcomes

Functional outcomes

Life milestones

 • ‘He said [um], “I’m grown up now Mum,” and he didn’t see me for a long time… as though he’s struck out to be an adult… but he wanted to start where he left off when he was a teenager.’ [C03]

 • ‘He wants to get married; he’d love to have children… you know he wants to have the life that everybody else has and he didn’t see himself not having that life and he’s like forty now and it’s like, you know, where have those twenty years gone when I should have been doing all this.’ [C32&33]

 • ‘Bear in mind she’s still, almost her development stopped when she was 17 as an adult.’ [C38]

Getting out

 • ‘He’s been able to go out because before, he was frightened to go out not only because of what was out there, but because inside himself he couldn’t actually get out the door.’ [C06]

 • ‘For three years she didn’t really do anything, she just, for three years she was just at home… sleeping a lot and watching tele and not going out and generally not living.’ [C19]

Pets

 • ‘He’d said… “I can’t manage myself let alone a dog”… it’s only recently that he said, “Oh yeah I think I’m up to having a dog,” so that’s a really good step forward.’ [C14&15]

 • ‘He loved the kitten but I thought he can look after the kitten… but he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t look after it, he just loved it. It’s a cat now and he still loves it but he still won’t look after it.’ [C51]

Personal Recovery

Personality/temperament

 • ‘He’s much easier when he’s on medication, he’s much more like himself and [um], oh god when he’s not on it I have to watch every word I say.’ [C12]

 • ‘I could see beneath his anxious anxiety and still his distress and everything, that there he was, my son that I knew whereas I’d lost sight of it completely before… I began to see the [1] that I knew before he became ill. He got his sense of humour back… I began to see his own personality coming back.’ [C09]

 • ‘Becoming more friendly, becoming more co-operative… more considerate, thoughtful.’ [C03]

Vulnerability/sensitivity

 • ‘He’s very sensitive, very, very sensitive… he gets very stressed doesn’t he.’ [C14&15]

 • ‘Until the stress was sort of plonked upon him and then the medication wasn’t quite enough.’ [C23]

 • ‘It was times of stress and things…whether things went wrong then we’d get the paranoia then... he can’t take any stress that’s the thing.’ [C32&33]