Conclusions

The NEON Programme ran from 2017 to 2023. It has synthesised existing and new evidence on the characteristics of mental health recovery narratives, provided RCT evidence that mental health recovery narratives can provide sufficiently cost-effective benefits to QoL, and demonstrated that an automated algorithm can make narrative recommendations with the capacity to help people. The available literature on the impact of recovery narratives was particularly limited at the start of our programme, and we have made a substantial contribution to this, including through the first definitive trial registered with ISRCTN demonstrating a benefit to meaning in life. Through conducting our work, we have established an inclusive recovery narratives definition, developed ethical and legal processes for curating recovery narrative collections, documented the various ways in which social factors influence narrative experience, and developed a narrative-based intervention that priorities diversity narrative form, and narrator identity. A promising next step for research would be a RCT evaluation of the NEON Intervention with current users of statutory mental services experiencing psychosis.