User involvement in community mental health services – principles and practices

Although user involvement has been the vision of mental health care for the last decades, there are indications of this vision remaining as rhetoric rather than reality in many clinical settings. The objective of this paper is to raise some fundamental questions associated with user involvement. Four challenges are examined: assumptions about the nature of the problems, the power of defining 'true knowledge', the power domination in service provision and community mental health care as an accommodating arena for maximizing the service user role. Finally, some strategies are suggested in order to overcome barriers towards realizing the intentions of user involvement.