This study explores the teaching role of activists and community advocates who have become involved in the education and preparation of mental health professionals. Placed in the transcultural mental health context, the study aims to identify central features of the 'teaching role' of consumer and carer advocates as they have become employed via participatory strategies and employment scenarios within mainstream teaching programs and transcultural mental health centres. / The research approach used for this exploration is based on hermeneutics and ethnography, where I visit organisations and individual advocates on a participant- observation basis. This approach locates my researcher role as a central reflexive author in generating and interpreting data from experiences of organisational teaching practice, from conversing with advocates and clinical educators and from collecting and reading consumer and carer perspectives on reform in mental health care. Making interpretations from these social experiences means that I make selective use of relevant autobiographical details and knowledge from my employment in the mental health sector. / The central theme of the study is how consumer and carer advocates teach via the notion of lived experience, a key expression of recent workforce development policy in Australian mental health. The research outcomes from this focus indicate that the teaching work of advocates in contributing authoritative knowledge of self and others is influenced by many factors intrinsic to their performed representative role, rather than exclusively by their personal experience as a consumer or carer, as the policy of lived experience would suggest. I argue that the requirements of teaching as defined by the expectations of employing organisations and the clinical audience, and by traditions in representative advocacy and professional education all shape the way in which advocates build and express their knowledge in educational work. / From this broad interpretation, the study also argues that organisations in mental health need to carefully think about the way they construct teaching positions for community advocates and support their work. Performance expectations of representing others, being able to portray cultural understandings, effectively educating clinicians, utilising their personal stories and histories, and meeting other employment related tasks place diverse and possibly contradictory pressures on the consumer or carer wishing to express their perspective to the workers in the sector. / The study's major emphasis on the role requirements of advocate/ teachers and organisational expectations is then connected to a broader conversation about how (consumer) participation models are able to facilitate and support the involvement of community and identity groups not traditionally associated with the consumer movement. This focuses attention on how existing consumer models are bound to the language of consumerism and mental illness. The implications of these boundaries for realizing the ideals of participation in mental health are then discussed. This helps to contextualise the idea of whether the mental health sector is in a position to facilitate a democratic recognition of the service needs of different community groups. / Thesis (PhDNursing)--University of South Australia, 2005
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/286280 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Loughhead, Mark |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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