Pacific Clinics Advancing Behavioral Healthcare - Empowerment
Pacific Clinics Advancing Behavioral Healthcare - Empowerment
Consumers are encouraged to assume leadership roles

Empowering Consumers

The Path to Recovery, Community Engagement, and Employment


Building on Individual Strengths
Pacific Clinics holds, as one of its basic truths, that consumers of behavioral healthcare services hold within themselves the keys to their recovery. To that end, consumers are encouraged to take an active role in their treatment and to participate in the many avenues provided to give voice to their concerns and ideas that will maximizing each person's potential for an improved quality of life.
At Pacific Clinics, a trusting, attentive relationship with the consumer encompasses:
  • Caring and respect for the whole person and their individual culture, language needs, interests, abilities, family and personal relationships
  • Identifying and developing an individual's personal strengths as the basis for their path to recovery
  • Assisting in defining - and progress towards achieving - consumer-set goals
  • Including families and caregivers in care planning, counseling, education and access to extended resources.

Giving Voice
Consumers are encouraged to take leadership roles in Pacific Clinics' activities and programs: that include:

Consumer-Run Clubhouses/Drop-In Centers

Daily activities and periodic outings of consumers' choice that provide outlets for developing skills, expanding interests, and enriching social relationships.

Advisory committee participation

Where consumers generate ideas to enhance services and program planning to better meet their needs.

Consumer Boards that give a representative voice to consumers

The Quality Assurance Boards, F.A.C.E.S, and mini-Boards members, often representing other consumers or family members from treatment sites or other constituentcies, receive valuable training in leadership skills and protocols for having their voices heard in shaping the policies and programs of Pacific Clinics. Many members also actively participate in community mental health boards and advisory committees

Anti-Stigma Group

Consumers lead information and educational outreach campaigns that raise awareness of mental health issues among legislators and the public. With the help of Toastmasters International, members' speaking and leadership skills are strengthened in a supportive environment to instill confidence.

Pathway to Employment

The Mental Health Worker Course, a collaboration between Pacific Clinics and community colleges in two counties -- Pasadena City College and Santa Ana College -- offers consumers and the public an opportunity for career training in the mental health field. Fourteen of these 10-week paraprofessional trainings have been held since the course's inception six years ago with many graduates now employed at Pacific Clinics and elsewhere.

Pacific Clinics Main Office: 800 S. Santa Anita Ave., Arcadia, CA 91006, Tel: (626) 254-5000