Neglected voices: consumers with serious mental illness speak about intensive case management.

This study explores early alliance formation between adult consumers with schizophrenic-spectrum disorders and their case managers from the consumers' perspectives using a prospective, cohort design. While quantitative studies have demonstrated positive links between the alliance and some client outcomes, such methods cannot reveal in concrete and authentic ways what consumers want in the case management relationship. This study finds that consumers can provide tangible and insightful information about the specifics of their case management relationships, confirming previous findings about the desire for connection with others, while extending it to include the desire for connection to the social world through the case manager relationship.