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Are you a Lived Experience Practitioner (LXP)? (Mad) Academic? Student? Clinician? Service User? Carer? Come and join us - Mad Studies is for everyone :-) Mad Studies Birmingham is passionate about Mad Knowledge & Mad Literature. The Politics of Service User Labour is a zine co-written by our very own member, Lucy Costa & Lisa Walter. The zine talks about issues that concern service users/survivors who perform different kinds of labour (paid and unpaid) in the mental health sector. These issues are part of the legacy of patient labour in the psychiatric system. Though there have been improvements in employment and inclusion opportunities over the years, problems remain. We still need to work together to advance working conditions, wages, and benefits for service users/ survivors. Service user labour is political. Everything that happens in relation to it, whether in paid or volunteer work, has social and economic contexts. Itʼs grounded in a long history of institutional power.  So while this zine looks into problems that affect individuals who do this work, we also raise issues that affect our community as a whole. We also delve into messy topics like how service user/survivors can be complicit in upholding oppressive practices when they participate in the system, and the need for accountability. This stuff is challenging and messy, but also really important for creating better, more equitable labour and inclusion practices. The Politics of Service User Labour, by Lucy Costa & Lisa Walter here: https://empowermentcouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/POSUL-FINAL-web-version.pdf In addition, Dr. Sarah Carr has suggested a paper which has been published recently. We won't have time to cover this because of covering the Zine, but it is a great paper to add to your Christmas reading list! "Strengthening Review and Publication of Participatory Mental Health Research to Promote Empowerment and Prevent Co-optation" - authored by Michelle Colder Carras, Ph.D., Karen Machin, P.G.Dip., Marie Brown, Ph.D., Terry-Lee Marttinen, M.A., Charlotte Maxwell, M.Ed., Barbara Frampton, Matthew Jackman, B.S.W., Nev Jones, Ph.D. You can read it here: https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ps.20220085

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