IEPA 11

Arguably a legacy of more traditional models of symptom/disease-focused healthcare, clinical development and research in early psychosis services have tended to prioritize problem-focused, individual-level interventions and associated research. This plenary is designed to serve as a call to simultaneously deepen and diversify our engagement with the structural and social contexts of psychosis onset, the interpretation of psychotic symptoms, client and family service utilization, and longer-term trajectories of recovery and/or disability. Frameworks developed within the structural competency and participatory research literatures will be invoked as powerful, if still largely unrealized, mechanisms for shifting the foci of both services and research away from individuals towards the complex social systems in which they are embedded.