Mental health day activities is a web-based database of literature on the recovery approach in community based vocational / training adult mental health day services.
The recovery approach has been defined as follows:
‘Mental health is a journey of healing and transformation enabling a person with a mental health problem to live a meaningful life in a community of his or her choice while striving to achieve his or her potential.’
(US Department of Health and Human Services, 2005)

The database currently contains 301 journal articles, books, reports and research studies, identified in the following ways:

Extensive background scoping of the topic
Systematic searching of 14 bibliographic databases
Searching databases of research organisations
Searching and browsing key journals
Harvesting references from key documents
Searching for further records by key authors in the field
Recommendations from key authors

The dates of literature coverage are 1978-Summer 2006.

Records have been systematically keyworded with generic keywords (e.g. country, type of study, population group and intervention characteristics (including setting, provider and type)) and subject specific keywords (e.g. mental health diagnosis, or the types of outcomes reported).

Searches can be carried out using these keywords, or by using free text terms. Individual search stages can be combined in the 'Search History' using the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. Several other functions have recently been added to facilitate searches on this database. Use 'Explore' to browse a list of studies which have been coded according to a selected keywording term. The 'Crosstabs' function can be used to generate a table comparing keywording terms against each other.

The summary report on the systematic map including the original search strategy is available on the SCIE website at http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/adults.asp