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Mental health service users' aspirations for recovery: examining the gaps between what policy promises and practice delivers
- Authors:
- DAVIES Kate, GRAY Mel
- Journal article citation:
- British Journal of Social Work, 45(S1), 2015, pp.i45-i61.
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This paper draws on findings from an Australian study of mental health service users' perspectives on service user participation to examine the challenges for translating recovery policy into practice. It considers the ways in which national mental health policies and developing welfare reforms reflect and/or contradict the highly personal mode of recovery important to service users; though they seemingly signal potential wins for service user empowerment, they are accompanied by losses for those who do not fit neatly into clinical categorisations. The service users (n = 11) and service providers (n = 6) interviewed for this exploratory qualitative study revealed that recovery was a lifelong process of fluctuating capacity and described a system poorly equipped and often unwilling to move beyond tokenistic modes of participation. The analysis of service user perspectives against the backdrop of policy reform reveals the ongoing tensions between personal and clinical definitions of recovery. (Publisher abstract)
Putting the parity into service-user participation: an integrated model of social justice
- Authors:
- DAVIES Kate, GRAY Mel, WEBB Stephen A.
- Journal article citation:
- International Journal of Social Welfare, 23(2), 2014, pp.119-127.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
Models of service-user participation have derived from citizenship or consumerist agendas, neither of which has achieved the structural reforms important for the most marginalised social work clients. This article proposes Fraser's model of ‘parity of participation’ as an appropriately multifaceted frame for capturing the social justice aspirations of service-user participation. A qualitative case study compared the experiences and expectations of people who had used Australian mental health services with a sample who had used Australian homelessness services to examine their expectations of participation at individual and representative levels. The findings reinforce concerns from Fraser's research about the tendency for identity-based consumerist notions of participation to reify group identity. This leads to tokenistic service-user involvement strategies that have little impact on participation at a structural level. Fraser's parity of participation is shown to have untested potential to reshape service-user participation to meet the social justice aspirations of social work clients. (Publisher abstract)