The Ten Essential Shared Capabilities

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• Developing socially inclusive practice
  • 1. Inclusion
  • 2. Assessment
  • 3. Exclusion
  • 4. Community
  • 5. Focus
  • 6. Empowerment
  • 7. Further Learning

4. Community – Working beyond the mental health service

There are a variety of things that can be done to enable a person to get and keep their preferred lifestyle and these will be explored in Section 5. First we need to help communities to be more respectful and welcoming towards people who have experienced mental distress.

The ‘viewing point’ from which we look at the wider community may be similar to our view of people who use services. The Strengths Model (see ESC 6 Identifying People’s Needs and Strengths) acknowledges that people who use services are a mixture – joy and despair, achievement and disappointment, love and selfishness – and then encourages us to pay extra attention to the person’s positive talents and achievements. Indeed, some so-called problems need to be recognised as strengths, especially when working with people who have had a very lengthy contact with mental health services.