Self advocacy, hope, and the mental health profession

Let's say that you are working in a community mental health center. Let's say that you have a client that has a mental health diagnoses. Let's say that you are a new treatment provider, because his old one lost his job because of gross incompetence. You discover that the treatment provider has not met with the client in the past three months. What in the hell do you do?
Let me state that this is a hypothetical case. I am using this case to talk about the importance of teaching our clients self advocacy skills. Especially a client's in a community mental health environment. I can use this case study to talk about the ethics of the profession. I am not going to do that. I have studied self advocacy theory for a very long time. Self advocacy in a nutshell is about expressing choices that affect your own life. It is also about standing up for your rights. It is also about taking control over your own life. Self advocacy is something that is extremely important to me. I also believe that as ethical professionals we must empower clients to get some level of control over their own lives. Often times people in the community mental health environment are treated as less than. Is this right? No. This is why I have a love-hate relationship with community mental health. Some organizations client get lost in. This is live self advocacy skills are very important. If we teach our clients to advocate for themselves, then when something goes wrong they client will be able to express what they need.
Is this complicated in a community mental health environment, absolutely. Some people could argue that some people have a severe mental illness that prevents them from advocating for themselves. In my response to this, I say severe mental illness is about recovery. With treatment people will improve the quality of their lives. They might have times where they are in crisis, and needing to get stabilized back on the road to recovery. Self advocacy is a tool to empower our clients to some level of control over their lives. I argue that if we teach self advocacy, clients will be able to stay in recovery. We need to give people are hope, that life will get better. Hope is a valuable commodity, that must be giving freely to all people.