It gives me great pride and pleasure to be presenting this book, both for the excellence of its content and for its triumph in bringing together the work of sociologists, ‘service users’ and ‘service user sociologists’ to celebrate a unique event and to stand as evidence of the width and depth of service user research and its implications. It was inspired by the seminar series ‘Researching in Mental Health: Sociological and Service User/Survivor Perspectives’, held at the British Library in 2009 by the Survivor Researcher Network and the British Sociological Association's Sociology of Mental Health Study Group. The series was devised and coordinated by Lydia Lewis, Angela Sweeney, Ruth Sayers and David Armes and included displays of work from two survivor organisations: The Survivor History Group and Recovery. In the introductory chapter, ‘Watershed moments in survivor research’, Angela Sweeney details how the series came about, and what was entailed; an edited version of the report on it, presented to the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness in July 2009 by Lydia Lewis, is to be found in the Appendix. Special thanks are due to Angela Sweeney and Lydia Lewis not only for their enormous work in the original series, but also for their help to me, as a service user researcher, and a first-time editor, in producing the book.

Eight of the book's chapters are contributed by presenters in the series: Angela Sweeney; Peter Beresford and Kathy Boxall; Hugh Middleton; Steve Gillard, Kati Turner and Marion Neffgen; Lydia Lewis; Patsy Staddon; Jayasree Kalathil; and Sarah Carr. Further academic and service user perspectives on user involvement are added in the chapters by Katherine Pollard and David Evans; Wendy Rickard and Rachel Purtell; and Hugh McLaughlin. In this way, it has been possible to consider the sociological implications of service user involvement and how it may develop in the future.

Many thanks are due to Jude England at the British Library for all her help with the seminar series, and to Karen Bowler, Laura Vickers and Isobel Bainton of The Policy Press for their support with the book's production. I should also like particularly to thank Dr Jackie Barron of the Women's Aid National Office for her unstinting encouragement of me as a new editor in the academic field.