Participants and recruitment A total of 34 individuals and 8 couples were interviewed (i.e. 50 people in 42 interviews). While qualitative methodology papers tend to avoid prescribing hard guidelines for sample sizes for qualitative studies, 25-30 participants have been deemed an acceptable minimum by Dworkin [27] and this number is usually sufficient for reaching data saturation. An email circulated by charity Rethink Mental Illness' was responded to by 102 people who were screened via telephone to confirm that they were the carer of someone with a > 2-year diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Within this self-selecting convenience sample, participants were then recruited purposively to generate a relatively heterogeneous final sample,