Essays

The term ‘service user’ is used here to refer to people who use mental health services. (It is also use within the UK’s National Health Service to describe anyone using any service.) Sometimes service users are referred to as one group as if they had one voice, e.g. “service users want this change…”. However, like all groups of individuals, mental health service users are people with some things in common and some differences of opinion. They may form groups because they live in the same area or have had similar experiences (such as the Hearing Voices Network). Some people use mental health services but would not want to connect with, or might not know about, user groups or the service user voice.

The comments below are made by five of us who worked on the Testimony Indexing Project. The Indexing project was set up to analyse the transcripts of the Testimony Archive and work out a number keythemes to give users of the archive an overview of it's content and access to some initial browsing.