The Social Responsibility of the State to its Citizenry: Performance of the Social Services Delivery in Mental Health Care Sector

Abstract

The state by virtue of social contract with citizens and being a welfare state has the responsibility to provide services for its citizenry which include health and social services. Health services must include mental health services. The measurement of the performance of the quality of mental healthcare services cannot be appropriately be done in a linear process of input/output as the medical model is based, neither can it be done in a hierarchical system order of delivery as being controlled by the state using government targets and budgetary constraints. One of the major problems of the mental healthcare system is identified as lack of collaboration among actors of the mental health system. The research therefore will look at the possible solution to this problem. It is argue that to find the best possible solution one need to explore the notion or the concept of Actors-Dialogism-System which is the notion of dialogism as a way of expressing a plurality of logics in different ways, namely voices, styles, discourses, artefacts etc. All organisations in the mental healthcare services delivery could be labelled as storytelling organisations. Storytelling is therefore being used as a ‘facilitatory’ system’ to create and maintain the dialogism of the mental healthcare system.