The international mental health user/survivor movement has been around for nearly 40 years. It started as a protest movement but it has over time become more absorbed into the mental health system. The movement has created leadership opportunities in its independent activities, and the idea of leadership in one’s own recovery, but the policy of service user participation in mental health services has failed to deliver consistent participation, let alon...

The mental health sector, like any other, is crowded with bureaucracy, politics, standards, indicators, jargon, gossip and other day-to-day diversions. In this atmosphere it’s difficult to disentangle oneself enough to burrow down and explore the bedrock of beliefs the mental health system is based upon. These beliefs drive our thoughts and feelings, our behaviour and our systems, but we are often barely aware of them.

Occasionally I get the time to dig down into these bedrock beliefs. I d...

People with major mental distress often suffer multiple personal, social and economic losses. Our personal loss of power and self-esteem does not so much derive from the condition itself, but the attitudes we and others have towards it. We may feel shame. Those around us may feel pity and fear. Our paid helpers often reinforce these responses by pathologising our experience. Once our personal losses have taken hold, a cascade of social and economic losses tends to follow, such as isolation, u...