How can we better understand what people with mental health issues need and how can we help develop support that fits in well with their daily lives? That is what Thijs Beckers wants to clarify with his research. Many people with long-term mental health problems receive mental health care for years. Receiving care for too long is not desirable: you can become dependent on care and feel less able to recover on your own. Yet we still know little about why some people need a lot of help and others do not. In this thesis, I therefore look at the role of social support from family, friends and other people around someone in the use of mental health care. The usual ways of determining how much care someone needs often do not give an accurate picture. What someone experiences in daily life and how much social support they feel appears to be at least as important. Without social support, the amount of care usually does not change. With sufficient support, however, the amount of care can increase or decrease. The familiar pattern of more care when things are going badly and less when things are going better therefore works mainly when there is sufficient support in the environment. Fixed, extensive programmes to increase social support often do not work well for people with long-term mental health problems. Short-term and personal forms of support do seem to help. It is therefore important for care providers to take a close look at the social support available to the people they are helping.
Thijs Beckers works as a mental health nurse specialist at MET ggz. There, he supports people with long-term mental health issues. Within MET ggz, he has previously held various positions and conducts research into forms of recovery-supportive care outside of regular mental health care, such as recovery academies. Thijs also conducts research into misunderstood behaviour at the police academy, in collaboration with the Arnhem and Nijmegen University of Applied Sciences. In addition, he helps develop training for police officers and other professionals so that they can better deal with people who exhibit misunderstood behaviour. He focuses primarily on recovery-oriented work, mental health and dealing with misunderstood behaviour. Through his research, he aims to improve understanding of what people with mental health issues need and to help develop support that is well suited to their daily lives.