Understanding Change in Community Mental Health Practices through Critical Discourse Analysis

Scholarship in the community mental health field has sought to understand the process of recovery from serious mental illness. Emphasis has been placed on the development and implementation of interventions designed to achieve concrete, professionally derived outcomes. Less emphasis has been placed on understanding how practitioners learn to implement evidence-based recovery-oriented practices over time and the tools that they use to develop such understandings. Because understanding learning and change are questions of both research and practice, it is important to develop tools suited for both. In this article, I make the case for using critical discourse analysis within a participatory action research framework—a merger that is analytically and theoretically salient and offers insights for practice in the field of community mental health.