Introduction

The focus of this chapter is the ‘experiential knowledge’ of mental health service users and the part it has played and can play in shaping mental health thinking, policy, practice, research, education and services. Our aim is to explore service users’ experiential knowledge – or perhaps we should say knowledges, since there is no one homogeneous service user knowledge – in more depth, and to situate this discussion within broader sociological understandings of knowledge production. The chapter draws on feminist and disability movement critiques of traditional social research to examine academic and professional understandings of knowledge and their role in relation to service user knowledges. Finally, we conclude by considering the impact of service user knowledges on ways in which madness and distress can be understood.

Before we begin this discussion, we first need to say something about ourselves; the two of us have direct personal experience as users or recipients of mental health services and currently work as social work educators in British universities. Our contact with the psychiatric system has been hallmarked by ‘personal tragedy’ understandings of madness and distress, underpinned firmly by a perceived biomedical ‘impairment of the mind’ (Oliver, 1990). The challenging of unhelpful individual deficit approaches to understanding madness and distress provides a starting point for this chapter, so too does our desire to challenge the conventional epistemological separations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – those who make knowledge about mental health service users and those about whom such knowledge is made. However, we are also clear that although we speak from our own experience, we cannot speak for other mental health service users, and writing a chapter that situates service users’ knowledges in relation to wider understandings of knowledge inevitably leads to ambiguities and confusions when, as authors, we occupy dual positions as ‘knowers’ and ‘known’. This has led to difficult decisions about ‘voice’. In the interests of clarity – although at the risk of reinforcing the putative objectivity of ‘academic voice’ – we have written about service users as ‘them’. Anomalies of this nature are, of course, the very issues with which this chapter is concerned in its exploration of the place of service user knowledges in relation to conventional academic and professional understandings of what constitutes knowledge.