It is only with difficulty that we can even conceptualise how consumer participation mechanisms would work. As a project auspiced by a consumer organisation we have had some experience in developing ways to 'do' consumer participation that seem to work. Consumer Driven It is very easy to mis-use 'buzz' words like empowerment, participatory etc. Service providers wishing to develop a service which is truly participatory need to think very carefully about empowerment and disempowerment and about how groups can have opportunities to act from a base of group confidence when they have been previously the victims of systemic disempowerment. Therefore if such initiatives are going to be consumer driven they must operate from a consumer perspective.
Consumers have a unique perspective.
They are the only ones who have actually experienced services from the 'bottom-up'. This is not just a matter of some sort of reluctant acceptance that there is more than one way of seeing any situation and that therefore service providers should make themselves available to hear things from another's point of view. Rather, it is a matter of service providers recognising that there are dominant and subordinate 'truths' which surround the provision of services in the psychiatric sector and that the people with the least power and the least capacity to assert their understandings are consumers. Ideas which have come from a consumer perspective, consumer driven decision making forum will have more purchase in the lived reality of service delivery if the providers of that service feel themselves to have been collaborative partners in the decision making processes. Here are some ways to start that we have found useful.