CALD Consumer CALD consumers are members of a community who speak a language other than English. They provide a voice and mentoring for their community in relation to mental health information and ways to access services. Through sharing their culturally lived experience of managing and living with an ongoing mental illness or condition they promote and help others to recover. They do this by educating both their own linguistic communities as well as mental health service providers, Australian mental health consumers and carers and the public generally.

Recovery Put simply " Recovery means being and getting well ".

When we talk about mental health and culture, for many people with a mental illness or condition, recovery is an ongoing rehabilitative process with a wider meaning than " being and getting well"

Recovery is about:

• Re-adjusting and rediscovery of identity within multicultural Australian society, a journey through which we sometimes need to overcome culture shock and come to an understanding of who we are and how to manage who we want to become
  
• Learning or relearning skills and coping techniques so that our family and ourselves can have a well adjusted life.
  
• Building relationships with people who can stand by you and believe in you
  
• A process that is not linear where symptoms may reoccur
  
• Overcoming the consequences of being ill and having had a mental diagnosis and the stigma that may have been experienced as part of this.

Self Assessment

Self-assessment is a process where the health professional asks you a series of questions so that they can better understand your thoughts and feelings from your perspective. You may be asked the questions, through an interpreter if your English skills are limited or you may be given a pre-translated form to fill in, in your own language. One form is called the Kessler K 10 , which asks you to tell the health worker about your feelings over a 4 week period. The questions are designed to see how much anxiety and depressive symptoms you may be having and how you feel you are coping. . This form is available in 15 community languages. These languages are Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese, Croatian, Farsi, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Macedonian, Serbian, Spanish, Tagalog, Turkish and Vietnamese.

Mental Health Outcome and Assessment Tools and Training (MHOAT)

In order to provide quality services to people from different cultures with limited English mental health services in NSW are designing some standard approaches for all services. This involves the use of training, collecting the same information from people in the same way and trying to get the same result or outcome for people with similar needs. Mental health workers call this Mental Health Outcome Assessment Tools and Training or MHOAT. If you use or used a mental health service in the past you may be asked to give some information to researchers who have been employed to see if the standards work well for people with different cultural backgrounds with limited English.