| The key to practising collaborative psychiatry is to
make our knowledge and expertise available to people in a way which
increases their sense of empowerment, autonomy, strengths and personal
effectiveness. This can support people to develop a sense of our "expert"
knowledge as existing alongside their personal knowledge - to be taken
up by them as it enables them to live their lives by their ideas.
The knowledge and expertise we offer becomes a resource they can make
use of in their recovery journey. There are special challenges in
doing this in mental health work. This is partly because the context
we work in sets us up to be experienced as dis-empowering and also
because of the fragility of holding of personal knowledge from a patient
role.
To overcome these challenges we need:
- a social constructionist view of knowledge
- profound respectfulness for the
knowledge and resources each person holds
- therapeutic strategies for bringing
forward these personal resources
All this, and the strategies Johnella offers, need to be taken
up as strands to be woven together,
as in raranga
(the Maori word for weaving) to create a kete. »
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