Specific medication-taking behaviors such as organising a daily medication schedule, developing memory aid strategies, and administering the medication are important; however, contextual factors such as trusting one’s health care provider are also key to long-term medication-taking practices (Bajcar, 2006). For example, the association between medication beliefs and medication-taking behaviors is well-documented (e.g., Beck, Cavelti, Kvrgic, Kleim, & Vauth, 2011; Clatworthy et al., 2009; Patel, de Zoysa, Berndt, & David, 2008). Indeed, each medical encounter involves a conversation between two parties with disparate realms of expertise: the provider being the medicine expert and the health consumer being the expert on his or her own set of beliefs, preferences, habits, and so on. Medication taking, therefore, requires successful two-way communication between provider and consumer. Recovery-oriented and person-centered approaches to mental health care often evaluate success via client-centered outcomes such as satisfaction with treatment (Klingaman et al., 2015), and connect this satisfaction with consumer-driven patterns of communication (Williams, Weinman, & Dale, 1998). Although the emphasis of these models is on consumer behavior, clinicians play a crucial role in facilitating consumer-driven conversations. In the general medical literature, clinicians tend to be more verbally dominant than consumers (Laws et al., 2013; Levinson & Chaumeton, 1999; Roter et al., 1997; Wissow et al., 1998) and communicate in a more paternalistic and less client-centered style (Roter et al., 1997), which appears to be linked to lower ratings of consumer satisfaction (Bertakis, Roter, & Putnam, 1991; Clever, Jin, Levinson, & Meltzer, 2008; Hall, Roter, & Katz, 1988; Henry, Fuhrel-Forbis, Rogers, & Eggly, 2012; Kiesler & Auerbach 2003; Ong, Visser, Lammes, & De Haes, 2000; Roter et al., 1997). Although some psychiatric research has examined communication, this research has not typically examined the relationship between consumer–provider communication and consumer satisfaction among people with serious mental illness (SMI). Instead, psychiatric research has often focused on consumer–provider communication as it associates with shared decision making (Fukui et al., 2014; Matthias, Salyers, Rollins, & Frankel, 2012; Salyers et al., 2012), medication adherence (McCabe et al., 2013), and meta-cognition and functioning (Minor et al., 2015), or simply described the most frequent type of communications (Castillo et al., 2012; Cruz et al., 2011). One exception is a study by Steinwachs et al. (2011) in which individuals with schizophrenia were taught to be more active participants in their appointments. These consumers disclosed more psychosocial information and their providers responded with less verbal dominance and more client-centered communications (i.e., more discussion of psychosocial and medical information and less directives or procedural discussion) than was observed for control participants. The mental health consumers exposed to this intervention also rated their experience with their prescriber as more satisfying (Steinwachs et al., 2011). To our knowledge, no other research has examined consumer–prescriber communication and satisfaction within a sample of individuals with SMI.