Merging Professional Knowledge and Lived Experience in Mental Health Recovery: Rationale for an Independent Peer-Run Recovery Center in Sweden

The Swedish service user movement has a long history of non-organized civilian resistance against state institutions and practices involving individuals with psychiatric disabilities and mental health issues, which has led to new approaches and collaborations. Today, the service user movement works alongside the traditionally strong public sector to influence government policies and practices affecting individuals in need of psychiatric care and support, promoting social change through active participation at the system level. The service user movements’ now legitimized voice and influence also emphasizes the sociopolitical acknowledgement of experiential knowledge of service users and its value to mental health policy and practice, which is key to evidence-based practice and higher quality of service-delivery within mental health organizations MHOs. Outside the officially acknowledged and well-established service user movement organizations SUOs, there are still mobilizations of citizens with experiential knowledge of mental illness who share the contemporary SUOs’ goal of improving the lives of individuals with mental illness. These groups actively choose to remain outside the ongoing established collaboration between the organized SUOs and public institutions. There is hence a need to explore what knowledge and experiences that exist in these groupings whose voices currently are not included in the established SUOs, but also the incitements for actively taking an outside position to SUOs that are influential on the system-level.