CONSIDERATIONS FOR RESEARCH ON CONSUMER EMPOWERMENT AND PSYCHOSOCIAL INTERVENTIONS

Consumer empowerment is a political movement that, among many goals, s eeks to diminish the stigma and discrimination experienced by people w ith severe and persistent psychiatric disorders. This paper reviews re search strategies that address the methodological problems of studying consumer empowerment. Key issues include defining the subject of inve stigation, describing consumer-developed treatments using discovery-or iented research strategies, and sorting out the diverse roles of consu mers in contemporary psychosocial programs. Consumer empowerment intro duces a political paradigm into the understanding of severe mental ill ness, a paradigm that can be difficult to integrate with the goals of empirical research.