The psychiatric patient as consumer

The rocketing cost of good standard modern medicine and the constant strengthening of the consumers' voice are powerful factors behind the world-wide reorganization of medical services with the aim of improving cost-efficiency, quality and accessibility. The assumption of this article is that financial waste, redundancy and obsolence of medical systems are related to the non-participation of patients in the evaluation of the services they consume. These problems are demonstrated and analysed using examples from psychiatry, where the patients and their families constitute a relatively silent consumer group.