f we are going to move from surviving to thriving we need to go from treating people as if there was something wrong with them to talking with them about what they are experiencing. We need to go from labelling people as ill to listening to their stories. We need to go from trying to cure people of a supposed pathology to caring for them in their daily struggles. We need to go from diagnosing them to participating in dialogue with them.

Open Dialogue, developed by Jaakko Seikkula and colleagues in Western Lapland, is a community-based integrated treatment system that engages the person’s social network from the very first meeting while incorporating the ideas and practice of dialogism with an emphasis on listening and responding in order to mobilize the resources of the person at the centre of concern and their network. If we want to go from surviving to thriving we need to do everything we can to create caring personal communities. I think bringing Open Dialogue into mental health services could be one important step in that direction.

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