Welcome to the virtual hub for the ‘building service user/survivor* research capacity’ project.  We are a multi-national, predominantly English-speaking** group of researchers, students, activists and community members committed to increasing the inclusion, influence and impact of lived experience/mad/service user/survivor/disability perspectives in the context of clinical and applied services research.

*A note about language: across different national, regional and cultural contexts, terms used to designate those with experience of mental health systems, diagnoses/labels, distress, mental difference or neurodiversity, vary, often carrying different meanings and inflections.  Some center experience of services, others represent a move to reclaim identities tied to trauma, unusual experiences or extreme states, or to signal an explicitly critical stance vis-a-vis mainstream systems.  In some regions, activism in the mental health space is much more strongly tied to (cross-) disability organizing; in others critical mental health movements have evolved separately.  And finally, some view the work of 'mental health' activism as secondary to (or fundamentally bound up with) broader social justice struggles revolving around dominant economic systems,  income inequality, structural racism, neocolonialism and environmental degradation.  As a coalition, we support the many and varied ways in which those involved choose to identify. Further readings exploring language and identity can be found on our resources page.

**In addition, while we refer to ourselves as a multinational group (with current listserv members based in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK , Germany and India) and welcome involvement from those located anywhere, we do not in any way claim either a "global" identity or the capacity to represent diverse disability/mental health/extreme states experiential knowledge traditions and activism in different parts of the world.