Opening Doors in Mental Health

Edan V¹*

1. Eastern Health, Ringwood East, Victoria, Australia

In the past several years there has been increasing pressure on health services to involve the community in decision making processes including but not limited to evaluation, service delivery and policy development. With in mental health services this is reflected by the employment of consumer consultants and increasingly carer consultants.

Following several research projects in the early 1990s, Victorian DHS decided to fund consumer consultant’s positions in all AMHS. It was left to each AMHS to determine the structure and implementation of these positions according to service needs. Other than providing equal funding to AMHS, DHS provided no guidelines to assist in the development and structure of these positions.

Carer consultant’s positions were funded in 2002, with a much slower uptake by services. Again a variety of models are employed.

EHMHP has recently identified the difficulties inherent in asking service users and their families to participate in an active process that honours their unique and invaluable perspectives. In order to address this issue EHMHP has funded a short scoping project to identify a model of community participation that will include consumers, carers, family, friends and others from non worker backgrounds with interest in improving mental health services.

This paper will discuss the difficulties, barriers and benefits of community participation in mental health. We will explore the models currently used and the model finally decided on by EHMHP. The discussion will conclude with some examples of the empowering benefit of participation in mental health.