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It's only very recently that we, as mental health service users andsurvivors, have begun to think of ourselves in terms of our rights, rather than just of what's "wrong" with us. Yet we have long faced high levels of discrimination and stigma. This may be as a background to our lives, with language like "nutters", "mad" and "crazy" endemic in popular culture, from kids' TV onwards. More directly, it means strange looks when people find out about us and massive barriers restricting access to and opportunities in employment. Mental health service users are the group of disabled people with the highest level of exclusion from the labour market. The pressure for legislation extending compulsion and further restricting mental health service users' rights is only likely to make this worse.

To challenge and give focus to this discrimination, the Disability Rights Commission set up a mental health action group, made up of a majority of mental health service users, which in turn set up an action group of people with learning difficulties. Mental health service users have often been marginalised in the world of disability. There can be no doubt there are hierarchies here, as there are in other aspects of life. But there is now also no doubt that mental health service users are recognising their links with other disabled people and beginning to benefit from the increasing strength that comes from unity. The extended provisions of disability discrimination legislation and the support that the Disability Rights Commission is giving to the rights and interests of mental health service users are making a difference.

This is doubtless why many mental health service users and other disabled people have very mixed feelings about the replacement of existing equality bodies with a single, unified Commission for Equality and Human Rights.

Disability has always come bottom of the pile. There are widespread fears among health and social care service users that this will continue to be the case and without an organisation dedicated to dealing with disability discrimination, it will again be at risk of falling off the agenda.

But there's a problem with this argument too. Few of us fit neatly into any single box. We are rarely only one thing or another. Our identity may include many different strands of experience in complex relationships with each other, relating to age, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, culture and disability.

Independent disability consultant Jenny Morris has, for example, been critical of simplistic attempts to reduce the identity of a disabled woman to a matter of "double disadvantage" or to assess which oppression is "worse". Ayesha Vernon, in a research study she undertook as a black disabled woman¹, writes: "Disabled black and ethnic minority women experience a multiplicity of barriers resulting from the combination of disablism, racism and sexism." As one of the participants in her study, Anita, says: "It happens singularly, plurally and multiply, and it's the totality that counts at the end of the day. You are thought of as completely inferior because you are all three things."


That's what gives a unified rights body such liberatory potential. But there's a tension here, which can never be discounted, between what might work best in theory to safeguard our rights and needs, and how structures and organisations actually work in practice - their own internal logic. Many members of the disabled people's movement never set much store in equality bodies as a means of safeguarding rights. Instead, they argued for the proper resourcing of disabled people's own organisations.

In a complex context of institutionalised discrimination, just setting up one body to address all rights and needs is unlikely to ensure they are all addressed with equality and equity. Such a body has first to transcend dominant values. Mental health service users learned long ago what a difficult journey this can be for existing institutions. The rejection of disability discrimination and "mentalism", both in its own working as well as in society generally, must be written into the heart of the new equalities body. It must also be reflected in proper, dedicated resourcing, the recruitment of sufficient (disabled) staff, and specific priorities to take forward work to safeguard the human and civil rights of disabled people. Only then will it truly be "fit for purpose".

¹ Ayesha Vernon, "A stranger in many camps: The experience of disabled black and ethnic minority women", in Encounters With Strangers: Feminism and Disability, Jenny Morris (editor), Women's Press, 1996

Peter Beresford is professor of social policy, Brunel University, and is actively involved in the psychiatric system survivor movement.