Page 41 - ENGLISH SPEAKING E-MODULE

Speaking from a ‘consumer perspective’

‘Consumer perspective’ is a way of looking at mental health that values the lived experience

of those who have been diagnosed with a ‘mental illness’ as a crucially important source of
insight.

It’s based on a belief that, in the words of The Lemon Tree Project, “as individual
consumers we are the experts about our own life and carry the wisdom to best articulate our

own needs if we are accorded the time, space and means to do so” and that collectively we
have an important and valuable understanding of ‘mental health.’ Sometimes consumer

expertise is described as ‘lived experience.’ Our expertise and knowledge are often under-

recognised and even undermined by society and social institutions.

As mentioned earlier, while everyone must of course be free to tell our stories in our own
individual way, there are ways of approaching storytelling that respect ‘consumer

perspective’ storytelling. This tends to mean that the storyteller:

• will be in some way linked with other consumers or the consumer community/movement;

• will not automatically and unquestioningly use the language of psychiatric experts – instead

reflecting on whether or not this language makes the best sense of their own experience;

• will avoid making themselves look good by making other consumers look bad (e.g. by

pitting one diagnosis against another, or making it seem as if they worked harder than other
consumers to ‘recover’);

• will not pretend that there is a magic wand, simplifying a complicated situation to “inspire

hope”;

• will not adopt the judgmental and divisive language of mental health services such as ‘high

functioning’/‘low functioning’, ‘dependent’ etc., or adopt the mystifying language of the

bureaucracy unless there is a very good reason for doing so;

• may choose not to speak in forums where they know their contribution will be tokenistic or
where they have just been invited to tick the box which says ‘consumer participation’.

Conversely, less consumer perspective ways of presenting our stories include:

• automatically and unquestioningly using the language of psychiatry such as; “I’ve been a

schizophrenic for 14 years”;

• stating or implying that “the real experts” in mental health are non-consumers;

• using terms that put ourselves or others down;

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