Diana Rose is a long-term mental health service user and social scientist by academic background. She is Professor of User-Led Research at King’s College London and aims to use her ‘double identity’ or status as ‘outsider within’ to inform both her empirical and theoretical work. She is particularly interested in the ‘sharp end’ of psychiatric services having carried out many projects on acute provision, detention and compulsion from the service user perspective. She is currently working on the history and epistemological underpinnings of service user / survivor research.