Abstract
Presently, there is an increasing call for self-management strategies in healthcare. Self-management involves regarding patients as 'expert-clients', actively involved in the management of their own care. This approach is argued to have great advantages: it holds the prospect of more efficient and (cost)effective healthcare, and converges with theoretical developments underlining the importance of patients' self-experience. However, self-management in mental healthcare entails major conceptual problems requiring in-depth study from a humanities perspective in order to be solved. Self-management in mental healthcare can only be adequately realized when it is acknowledged that 'the self' itself is a core problem in psychiatry and psychosomatics. Existing self-management approaches do not fully recognize this and limit themselves primarily to management of disease. Therefore, the proposed project conceptualizes and implements self-management as management of the self. Consequently, it establishes a conceptual framework for understanding the self and self-management in mental healthcare. To achieve this, the project builds on theories of the self from various humanities-disciplines (including narratology, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and ethics) and establishes a productive dialogue between these theories, and psychiatry and psychosomatics. It integrates the narrative, embodied, emotional, and intersubjective dimensions of self-experience, and investigates the ethical and clinical conditions under which management of the self can be realized. By collaborating with well-known healthcare and research institutions, and international, pre-established networks, the project provides insight in self-experience in psychiatry and psychosomatics and enables innovative approaches to self-management that can fulfill more fully, the promise of providing effective, efficient, and co-operative mental healthcare.