Mental illness undermines a patient’s personal autonomy: the capacities of a person that enables them to live a meaningful life of their own making. So far there has been very little attention given to personal autonomy within psychiatry. This is unfortunate as personal autonomy is disturbed in different ways in psychiatric disorders, and understanding how autonomy is affected by mental illness is crucial for differential diagnosis and treatment, and also for understanding personal recovery.

The aim of this project is to better understand the role of autonomy in patients with psychiatric problems by doing a conceptual study on autonomy in psychiatry, develop a measurement scale of autonomy that can be used for psychiatric patients and develop an intervention to increase autonomy in patients with psychiatric problems.