Anneliese De Wet
Research Scientist
Anneliese de Wet, Ph.D., is a research scientist at the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation. She completed her Doctorate in Psychology in 2021 where her dissertation focused on the development of an individual measure of recovery for a South African context by exploring the understanding of recovery for individuals, their caregivers and their service providers, as well as exploring the barriers and facilitators of recovery. This was the first such measure developed for a South African population. A strong research interest that resulted from the dissertation, was peer support and its advancement in developing contexts, such as South Africa.
Anneliese’s other interests include utilizing positive psychological paths to address mental health challenges, such as stigma. For her postdoctoral study at the Center, she focused on exploring workplace stigma resistance and the mechanisms thereof among peer support specialists. During her postdoc, Anneliese was also engaged in other research at the Center, namely a randomized controlled trial testing the effectiveness of a coaching intervention to address peer specialists’ stress and distress on the job. Currently, she is involved in several studies at the Center. One such study is exploring state-level policies to support older persons with serious mental illnesses. Another is a scoping review of rehabilitation research from 2000-2020. Other studies she is involved with are testing the effectiveness of an intervention to promote healthy aging of persons who live with serious mental health challenges and an AI technology to augment the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model to improve the employment outcomes of individuals with psychiatric disabilities. Previously, in South Africa, Anneliese also conducted research on the lived experience of recovery from first-episode psychosis in a South African sample and worked on a Canadian CIHR-funded international, multi-site study on community engagement in HIV vaccine research.