[The power of professionals in rehabilitation: the example of service users' group in social care].

Increasingly the purposes and focus of mental health rehabilitation has turned away from a concern to maximise the functioning of individuals towards an interest in helping people with mental needs to interact sufficiently well with their environment so as to gain independence in everyday life (Wing, 1980). Rehabilitation is to be seen, therefore, as a process rather than an event (Sheppard, 1984). In other words, rehabilitation not simply a single treatment (or fixed series of treatment) but often will be a longer term intervention to maintain social functioning and support adaptation. A failure to understand this distinction or to translate it into guiding principle which informs all aspects of professional practice in psychiatric rehabilitation results in misdirected effort (or, worse, in a series of empty rituals which reinforce dependence) (Watts and Bennett, 1993; Brandon, 1991). A central question for all the caring professions engaged in psychiatric rehabilitation, therefore, is how to utilize their skills to enable and support this process.