Critical thinking stop point 35.1

Possible answer to: Reflect on the mental health services you have experience of. To what extent do they possess the features of an enabling environment?

From the relevant section of the chapter we can recall that:

The core standards of enabling environments refer to the collective of staff and service users as ‘participants’ or ‘members’, and include:

• an emphasis on the nature and quality of relationships between participants, and all participants being equally valued
• all behaviour, even disruptive behaviour, being viewed as meaningful
• all participants sharing responsibility for the environment
• efforts made to recognise and even out power imbalances; importantly, power and authority have to be accountable and open to discussion
• purposeful activity and engagement being encouraged, especially planned and spontaneous creativity
• clear and transparent decision making
• formal and informal rules and expectations being made clear, unless there is good reason for ambiguity. (Johnson & Haigh, 2011)

Your working environment may possess all, some or none of these characteristics, or they may be present in partial forms. You might also consider the extent to which your service makes use of greenspace. You could suggest to colleagues that your service considers an application to join the enabling environments network.