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Mental health users as educators: what can their narratives teach us?

In this article, we present a group of users of a community-based mental health service that work on training students, professionals and other users based on their own narratives of becoming ill and overcoming this. We found from the SciELO database that studies on this kind of work are still just beginning in Brazil. In this study, we conducted ten semi-structured interviews with participants in this group, using the phenomenological-hermeneutic method. The main objectives were to find out about the experience of users who participated in this activity and ascertain the possible points of confluence between the literature analyzed and the data found in this study. Benefits and difficulties resulting from this practice were pointed out by the users. We concluded that the narratives produced during this study indicate some relative correlations with other similar studies.

Service users; Mental health; Education; Narratives


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