Recovery in Austria: mental health trialogue

Abstract

The active involvement of service users and relatives and friends is essential for the development of recovery-orientated mental health practice and research. However, accepting each other as equally entitled experts is still a challenge. In trialogue groups users, carers and friends and mental health workers meet regularly in an open forum that is located on 'neutral terrain' - outside any therapeutic, familial or institutional context - with the aim of discussing the experiences and consequences of mental health problems and ways forward. Trialogues offer new possibilities for gaining knowledge and insights and developing new ways of communicating beyond role stereotypes. They also function as the basis and starting point for trialogic activities on different levels, e.g. serving on quality control boards or teaching in trialogic teams, and different topics, e.g. a task force on stigma busting or a work group on trauma and psychosis. In German-speaking countries well over a hundred trialogue groups are regularly attended by altogether about 5,000 people. International interest and experiences are growing fast. Trialogues facilitate a discrete and independent form of acquisition and production of knowledge and drive relevant changes in forms of communication as well as in structures.