What does 'mental health' actually look and feel like - and who decides?

If you're taking a drug or participating in psychological therapy, who decides whether it is 'working' or not? Currently, the views of professionals appear to count for much more than the views of people being treated. For example, the main measurement scales used to assess people's mood or mental state before and after treatment have not been put together by service users and are not completed by service users.

Mind has been involved in the development of a service user designed distress scale for assessing treatment outcomes. We have consulted widely to find out what features of mental distress people find most troubling - and what they really want from treatment, therapy or other kinds of support.

This workshop will highlight some of the messages coming through from this consultation and provide an opportunity to debate some of the wider issues that they give rise to.

Workshop leader:

Marcus Roberts, Head of Policy, Mind
Marcus has wide-ranging interests in mental health topics, including mental health and the environment, mental health and substance misuse and mental health in the criminal justice system.

He has a strong interest in human rights issues, and was Baring Foundation Fellow in Philosophy and Human Rights at the University of Essex in 1994.

He joined Mind in September 2006. Previously, he was Head of Policy at DrugScope, the UK's leading independent centre of expertise on drugs; and Senior Policy Adviser at Nacro, the Crime Reduction Charity. He also worked at the Children's Legal Centre at the University of Essex.

He was editor of the legal journal ChildRight from 1998 to 2000, and of Safer Society, the journal of crime reduction and community safety, from 2000 to 2002.

He is the author of numerous publications on social policy issues.

Before joining the voluntary sector, he taught politics and philosophy at the Universities of Brighton and Essex, and was an associate lecturer for the Open University. He has been on the editorial boards of Res Publica and Youth Justice Magazine and is a member of the Advisory Group of the Crime and Society Foundation at Kings College. He was a member of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Drugs and Alcohol Research Committee and was Secretary to the All Party Parliamentary Drug Misuse Group in 2005.