The strength in mental illness: A targeted identity-reframing exercise improves goal pursuit among people who have experienced depression

Widespread narratives frame mental illness as a sign of personal weakness. We theorized that these narratives impair individuals’ ability to realize their strengths and pursue their goals. To test this hypothesis, and to attain a practical intervention-tool, we developed a brief (~20-minutes), highly-scalable exercise that inverts weakness-narratives by highlighting the strengths people show contending with depression. Three large randomized-controlled experiments (Ntotal=748) show that this identity-reframing-exercise enhanced the confidence of people who had experienced depression to pursue their goals (Experiments 1a-b); and, over two weeks, the progress they reported making towards a self-selected goal from 43% to 64% (Experiment 2). Lessened stigma mediated the gain in confidence (Experiment 1b): While 71% of control-condition participants thought the strengths needed to pursue their goals did not describe people with depression well, identity-reframing reduced this to 52%. Complementing treatments of depression, efforts to invert weakness-narratives can help people recognize and access their strengths.