is an independent consultant who specializes in researching and lecturing on the topic of recovery and the empowerment of people diagnosed with mental illness. She is the creator of CommonGround, a web application to support shared decision making in the psychopharmacology consultation. It won the American Psychiatric Association's, Psychiatric Services Gold Achievement Award, the 2013 Scattergood Foundation Innovation Award in behavioral health and was a finalist in an international competition for Patient Empowerment by the Ashoka Changemakers Foundation and was recognized by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality as a practice innovation. Pat is an activist in the disability rights movement and has lived her own journey of recovery after being diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager.

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Mental health professionals commonly conceptualize medication management for people with severe mental illness in terms of strategies to increase compliance or adherence. The authors argue that compliance is an inadequate construct because it fails to capture the dynamic complexity of autonomous clients who must navigate decisional conflicts in learning to manage disorders over the course of years or decades. Compliance is rooted in medical paternalism and is at odds with principles of person-centered care and evidence-based medicine. Using medication is an active process that involves complex decision making and a chance to work through decisional conflicts. It requires a partnership between two experts: the client and the practitioner. Shared decision making provides a model for them to assess a treatment's advantages and disadvantages within the context of recovering a life after a diagnosis of a major mental disorder.

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