Empowerment, lifelong learning and recovery in mental health: towards a new paradigm

The field of mental health is currently undergoing a considerable paradigm shift in terms of re-thinking core issues that have been taken for granted such as chronicity, deficits and strengths, ability for social inclusion, peer support, education, training and employment and the meaning of empowerment and recovery from mental illness. Inevitably a change of this magnitude within the complex system in which mental health services operate everywhere attracts responses ranging from the enthusiastic right through to the dismissive and hostile. How to enable service providers, users, carers and the general public to be open to the possibilities the shift can lead to, and to actively participate in the process of this change, forms a central part of the contributions to this book.