Response to Commentary by von Peter to Happell, Brenda, & Scholz, Brett (2018). Doing what we can, but knowing our place: Being an ally to promote consumer leadership in mental health. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 27(1), 440–447

The commentary by von Peter to our recent article raises some important issues for us that we believe will need to be addressed in further research about allyship to the consumer movement. Despite clearly stating in our title that our focus was on supporting consumer leadership (i.e. at the systemic level of the mental health sector), much of von Peter's response appears to conflate allyship on a systemic level with support provided on an individual level. This potential misinterpretation is not von Peter's alone: we have been researching, writing, and advocating for systemic consumer leadership for some time, and it is not uncommon that people hearing us talk about consumer leadership assume we mean something more like assisted decision-making in individual care. Such assumptions may arise from the problematic but widespread stereotypical thinking that consumers do not have capacity for high-level leadership of mental health systems (Scholz et al. 2017).