• GLAD conference -- details on the UK Survivor's email list.
• 'Beautiful Mind' film -- cheap tickets available via NSF.
• A new book on hearing voices has been published by Lisa Blackman ('Hearing Voices, Embodiment and Experience', Free Association Books, 2000).
• There is to be a hearing voices conference in London in September.
• Philip Dixon Phillips discussed Tracey Brannan's therapeutic companion dogs scheme in Essex.
• Rufus May distributed some copies of the current issue of Asylum magazine which had covered last Summer's joint demo between the forum, Mad Pride and the Critical Psychiatry Network.

• Has two careers: research and mental health service user.
• Difference between user-led and collaborative research.
• User-led research could be both talked up and talked down:

Talking up -- There has been a climate change and Diana's unit has been involved in research into ECT which currently the Dept of Health is sitting on. There has been a paradigm shift in the doctor/patient relationship with a new scepticism re expertise (eg following Bristol and Alder Hey scandals).

Talking down -- Most money still goes to traditional research. Many researchers don't know what user-led research is. Different funding bodies have different definitions.

• Distinctions between user-led and collaborative research. Two user-led programmes from design to dissemination: The Sainsbury Centre User-led Research Project and the Lottery-funded Mental Health Foundation's Strategies for Living project. Both these projects had carte blanche but were in a 'bubble' in that they had no impact beyond their domain and not in the academic world beyond social science.
• The Service Users Research Enterprise is being set up with a clinical academic as manager and with a mixed steering group.
• There has been a change in consensus away from quantitative to qualitative research which can provide 'rich text' data'.
• User-focused monitoring can use statistical strategies and if it is done as audit then it doesn't need to go to ethics committees.
• Diana feels that the distinction between user-led and collaborative research does not make sense since the two kinds of programmes have a lot in common: interview-based; social surveys; construct questionnaires on research topics through brainstorming; they are often experience-based; people giving the questionnaires out were the people who had devised them. Often the projects were coordinated by 'double identity' researchers who were also service users. One difference is that UFM mainly involves closed questions and the outcome is different (statistics versus quotations). The two programmes have often reached similar conclusions. Eg on medication: there is a lack of information; there is over-medication; there is objection to compulsory treatment.
• There was a need to build capacity. There as a dilemma: gain acceptability by using quantitative methods. Eg in US Judy Chamberlain has developed a psychometric instrument in her research on recovery the Empowerment Schedule.
• Difficulties with acceptance by ethics committees. At the Maudsley there are now two service users on the committee.