Channel 4 screened Eleventh Hour's "We're not mad we're angry" in 1986. This was a unique docu-drama which took two years to make with a group of current and former psychiatric patients who held full editorial control. Many of the actors in the drama sequences had been service users; others were involved in the editing and production process. Many of the survivors interviewed were activists such as: Jan Wallcraft who became Mindlink's first co-ordinator; David Crepaz-Keay, who went on to manage Mental Health Media, then became Head of Empowerment and Social Inclusion at the Mental Health Foundation; Peter Campbell, the founder of Survivor's Speak Out'; Mike Lawson, the first survivor vice-chair of National Mind. This is the documentary in full, now available on Youtube.

Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast. A patient (Alan) talks to a consultant forensic psychiatrist about his admission to a medium secure unit

This site provides titles and summaries of literature on the topic of mental health. Entries are submitted by members of the network. May be of use in preparing reading lists and encouraging learners to access first person accounts and other reading which falls outside academic literature on the subject.

This bibliography has been prepared by Gail Hornstein - a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College in the USA. She describes it as being in four sections: '(1) personal accounts of madness written by survivors themselves; (2) narratives written by family members; (3) anthologies and critical analyses of the madness narrative genre; and (4) websites featuring oral histories and other first-person madness accounts'. It may be of value in encouraging learners to access first person accounts of mental ill health - alongside other resources such as the madness and literature network (which also provides summaries).

This module is part of the Health Talk Online collection of resources. It focuses on people’s experiences of psychosis. Many of the people interviewed had, at some point in their lives, received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. However there were a number of people who had never received this diagnosis but who had experienced psychosis i.e. hearing or seeing things or holding unusual beliefs which other people don’t see or share. This is a collection of online interviews which is searchable in a whole range of ways (ie by age group and by theme).

At the end of the 1990s a group of interviewers from a range of backgrounds went across England and Wales to record first hand accounts from individuals who had experienced life in old mental health asylums. Their aim was to create a historical resource coming from an often ignored perspective - instead of relying on opinions of those distanced from the situation, it would give those with direct experience the power to speak for themselves. This link provides access to the video interviews that the Testimony Project carried out between 1999 and 2001. Full transcripts and extracts from the interviews are available. This resource provides a helpful insight for students in to how mental health services were provided in the past, and can be used as a trigger for discussion about what has (and has not!) changed.