Mental Health Training In Advocacy For Better Patient Outcomes
Mental illness is something that is still met with suspicion, ignorance and stigma. While we have come a long way from the days of chaining people to walls and drugging them to near states of catatonia, stigma is still rife within our communities and our health services. While policies and procedures go some way toward dealing with this, the best way to deal with stigma is to educate. Mental health training that tackles stigma directly, and teaches compassion and advocacy is the only real way to change minds and beliefs. Mental health advocacy has developed significantly in the Western world over the past 20 years. Employing advocates within health settings has been one major way of challenging the discrimination faced by users and survivors of the mental health system. Advocacy in all its forms seeks to ensure that people are able to speak out, to express their views and defend their rights. But the paradox is that many mental health consumers are not able to do this adequately for themselves without the support and empowerment of clinicians. The very nature of chronic mental illness is disabling to the point where some consumers need professional advocacy. Sadly, even though it should be a core value of practice, and ALL clients SHOULD be advocated for, many mental health professionals still struggle to do this in a way that is respectful and genuinely helpful. Having a mental health problem, or experiencing mental distress, often means that your opinions and ideas are not taken seriously, or that you are not offered the opportunities and choices you would like. Being labelled with a diagnosis of mental illness is often linked to poverty, unemployment and exclusion from everyday life. In its simplest form, advocacy can mean just listening respectfully to someone. Focused advocacy and mental health training is available in many formats to help professionals, carers and organisations better understand advocacy in practice. Advocacy is a process of supporting and enabling people to:
express their views and concerns
access information and services
defend and promote their rights and responsibilities
explore choices and options
Friends, family and mental health professionals can all be supportive and helpful, but this may be difficult for them if they feel the individual is doing something that will ultimately be detrimental to their own wellbeing. This is the essence of professional 'duty of care'. However, duty of care can be met at the same time as working within an advocacy framework. Only at this point is treatment and care being exercised in a respectful and empowering way.