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Sammanfattning

Different ideological standpoints shape the understanding of severe mental illness and the actions taken in psychiatric care and social services. Decentralised and community-based care is today, after the psychiatric reform in Sweden 1995, replacing the mental hospitals. Deinstitutionalisation has thus caused a larger interest in the issue of knowledge and competence when caring for people with severe mental illness. This study focuses on similarities and differences of opinions and attitudes among professional caregivers. A questionnaire was distributed to 162 professional caregivers, 65 from psychiatric care and 97 from social welfare services. The results indicated that professionals within social welfare service did neither consider their knowledge of severe mental illness adequate, nor did they find their options to get further education and supervision satisfactory. Furthermore they felt they did not receive enough information when taking over responsibility from psychiatric care. When the participants were asked what personal characteristic they find most important in their work with people with severe mental illness, none of the questioned, either within psychiatric care or within social welfare service, made a priority to «believe what a person with severe mental illness says». Hence, booth organizations appear to put their confidence in professional knowledge, in favor of experiences expressed by people with severe mental illness.

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