Lived Experience Practitioners

In this article, Lived Experience Practitioners and the Medical Model: World’s Colliding? by Louise Byrne, Brenda Happell, and Kerry Reid-Searl, the main issue that is being discussed is the discriminations in the workforce that the Lived Experience Practitioners (LEP) have experienced from their non-lived experience colleagues and how that is stopping the LEPs from making an impact on reforming the mental health services. Promoting the recovery focus, which is more consumer-oriented, rather than strictly labeling/diagnosing and then putting the patient on medication that they might not have needed it. The problem is the unbalanced power between the LEPs and other health professionals and a critical need for the development of the LEPs within …show more content…
Thus, to only be fixated on one side of the problem and neglected all the others will hinder our ability to provide the patient with the service that they need, that is like putting on a bandage on a wound that needed more medical help and hoping that it will not get worse. Moreover, according to the author, the foundation of medical model approach is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which often than not provide the consumers with a more pharmaceutical focus, like putting them on pills. However, to define a patient with an “illness” and treat them by feeding them with different pills do not always work because the patient do not always take the pills that was prescribed to them, and for a professional to only assess them base on that then would they have to increase the level of the medications that they have prescribed their patient? Because the assumptions would then be that the medication is not working and that a stronger level is needed, never mind the fact that there is the possibility of the patient having problem with their family, community, or something else that might have prevented them from getting the medications or follow through with their