Watershed moments in survivor research

Survivor research is a relatively new form of service user activism. It formalises the desire of psychiatric system users and survivors to generate our own knowledge about our experiences. In its short history – little more than 20 years – survivor research has had a number of watershed moments. These include the publication of the directly challenging Have we got views for you (Beeforth et al, 1994) and the development of the first national survivor-controlled research programmes, User Focused Monitoring (Rose, 2001) and Strategies for Living (Faulkner and Layzell, 1999), in the late 1990s. More recently, the publication of the survivor-edited This is survivor research (Sweeney et al, 2009) demonstrated just how far survivor research has travelled. A seminar series at the British Library, also in 2009 – from which this book has emerged – represents another key milestone.

Entitled ‘Researching in Mental Health: Sociological and Service User/Survivor Perspectives’, the series was convened by a sociologist, Lydia Lewis, and three survivor researchers, Ruth Sayers, David Armes and myself. The aim of the seminar series was to promote dialogue, debate and mutual learning between sociologists and survivor researchers. Around 40 people from as far afield as Northern Ireland, France and Germany attended each seminar. Delegates came from a wide variety of backgrounds, including service users and survivors who had and had not been involved in research, sociologists, clinical academics, mental health researchers, and practising clinicians. Each seminar was accompanied by display stands from two survivor-controlled organisations, the Survivor History Group and Recovery. The series was a rare platform to share examples of survivor-controlled research. But it was also a unique opportunity to explore the similarities and differences between survivor research and sociological research, to establish common ground, and to expose and debate fracture points. As stated, this book emerged directly from the seminar series.

Sociology and survivors’ voices

Sociology has a strong tradition of representing the lives of people who are marginalised within society, and the history of the discipline is littered with classic texts which do just that. For instance, William Foote Whyte's (1955 [1943]) Street corner society, first published in 1943, sought to understand and represent the rich social world of underprivileged young boys and men in a Boston slum.