Service user involvement, authority and the ‘expert-by-experience’ in mental health

This article re-examines the politics of engagement of the UK mental health service user and survivor movement by focusing upon the mental health ‘expert-by-experience’. Using qualitative data, I illustrate how the service user and survivor movement is able to draw upon an experiential authority that is rooted in practices of self-help and peer-support. I do this by bringing an experimentalist reading of self-help and peer-support practices into dialogue with a model of traditional authority. As such, the personal can be linked up to the political in ways that emphasise the value of self-help and support practices as forms of political participation, while highlighting modes of engagement that are predicated on the capacities, rather than the needs, of the movement.