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Approximately one in every five Australians will experience a mental illness each year (ABS, 2007). Mental illnesses are not homogenous. There are no clearly established clinical pathways and, as such, care and treatment is necessarily highly individualised.
It is within this nebulous treatment approach that personal recovery is the goal for many who live with debilitating mental health issues. Personal recovery is not synonymous with cure, but can be defined as "gaining a social identity through engagement in an active life" (Moxham et al. 2015).
In recent years, self-determination has arisen as an area of importance within mental healthcare (Craike and Coleman, 2005). Carpenter (2002) asserts that there are strong links between increased self-determination and personal recovery. Self-determination can be considered as vthe propensity of an individual to act in a "self-directed, self-regulated, autonomous" way (Field et al. 1998). Such an approach is respectful of values and appreciates lived experience - a fundamental tenant of personal recovery. People with a lived experience of mental illness, however, report significantly low levels of self-determination (Okon and Webb, 2014). According to Hagger and Chatzisarantis (2009), self-determined motivation is strongly associated with engagement in positive health behaviours such as increased medication and service adherence, and other activities that promote wellbeing (Chang, 2011).