Assess and review the whole person: adopt a bio-psycho-socio-cultural- spiritual approach rather than assessing and reviewing a purely biological disease

Explore the role of social and environmental factors in mental illness and challenge them through appropriate avenues

Focus on capabilities, role restoration, strengths, and abilities instead of patient’s role dysfunction, weaknesses and disabilities.

Engage and involve immediate family, friends, support networks and/or socio-cultural network, in a context of confidentiality.

Encourage services towards progression and recovery rather than “maintenance” programmes that create dependency

Encourage the use of more empowering and hopeful terms, using the language of recovery for potential continual growth, and expectation of improvement.

Value the ‘lived experience’ from those who have suffered from mental illness and use as spirit guides and consumer consultants rather than devaluing them as perpetual dependents and life-long patients.

Promote healing and recovery through community living as a full citizen, and culturally valued (work) role, rather than institutional warehousing, play-work or just minding.

Work by consumers’ sense of time and sense of readiness to take the next step or rather than by service providers’ "clock", sense of impatience or resignation, or linear predictable sense of change.

Invoke consumer’s sense of agency and control, self-determination and choice from a range of interventions, and therapeutic optimism rather than professional control (we know what is best for you), and therapeutic pessimism.

Engage and involve the local community in taking responsibility for their own mental health (e.g., by local action groups or teams) rather than leaving it to authorities and mass-media campaigns, allowing the belief that “it is about them, not us”.

Teach mental health literacy to the community and health professionals, and challenging stigma rather than tolerating communal and professional ignorance, media stereotyping, discrimination and stigma.

Challenge the alienating assumption that “you are defined by your diagnosis” and the self-fulfilling prophecy of poor outcomes.