This is an exciting collection of writings by people who have experienced mental distress. It includes accounts of psychiatric treatment, psychotherapy and alternative treatments; life in mental institutions and moves into the community; self-help methods and work to improve mental health services. Moving, sometimes funny and often dramatic, the pieces are written by some of the key activists in the mental health survivors' movement, as well as by people best known as writers and poets and others who, for a period of time, have been caught up with mental distress and have something original to say.