Participation In Mental Health Care

Participation in mental health care poses many challenges for mental health service users and service providers. Consideration of these issues for improving the integration of service user participation in mental health care can help to inform integrated care within health care systems, broadly. This paper argues for practicing greater empathy and teaching it, stigma reduction, changing what we measure, valuing the intrinsic aspects of care more, employing more people with lived experience within mental health services, raising the visibility of service users as leaders and our teachers within services and redefining integrated care from the service user perspective.
Participation in mental health can mean individually focused collaborative, respectful inclusion of mental health service users in care decisions within their interpersonal encounters with service providers and systems. But it can also mean engagement with the notion of having a mental illness and seeking or accepting support. It can also mean participation at service and system level as peer workers and as advocates for policy and practice change. It focuses largely on the first of these forms of participation, individual …show more content…
Despite these benefits, service user involvement in mental health has been a slow journey. A study in south-east England sought service users’ views about level of involvement. Approximately one-third of participants did not feel encouraged by professionals to say what their aims were or given a choice for care and treatment in the