When you use a consultant (not specifically a medical one) there is a continuum between the following types: 1. Template driven: the consultant has a few templ

When you use a consultant (not specifically a medical one) there is a continuum between the following types: 1. Template driven: the consultant has a few templates which your problem has to match. A good consultant will tell you when your problem is outside their scope of their advice, or is nevertheless not actionable, but they don't always have the context to do this. Your responsibility as a client is to make sure that their advice will work and not cause other problems in your context. 2. A mentor: more flexible than the previous, they help analyse the situation and may do some (book) research for you. But their responsibility is limited to increasing your understanding and proposing solutions, the final decision and strategy for evaluating their solutions is still the clients. 3. Strategist: they take responsibility for ongoing management of the issue and making decisions. Actual execution of actions are still the clients responsibility but if there is an issue the consultant takes responsibility for figuring it out and either devising a way to proceed or finding an alternative approach. The problem with medical professionals, especially mental health, is that the impression is given that they are going to be 3, but often end up being 1 or 2, and the patient or carer needs to be the strategist. There can be an annoying motte and bailey situation, with the professional insisting that they are the strategist when the patient wants to question the approach, but falling back to being the mentor when progress isn't being made. Anyway the problem for records is that in mental health transition between these approaches needs to happen. The patient might have needed the psychiatrist to be the strategist when they were in a crisis, but then need to take over that role if the proposed solutions aren't working. When they do, they need honest and open records.