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In this issue the editorial is by A life in the day Board member Mary Nettle. It was written originally in response to the World Health Authority 1996 ‘consensus’ statement on ‘psychosocial rehabilitation’. Five years on has consensus been achieved…?

One of the biggest problems facing a person with a diagnosis who wants to get a job is how much to tell about those tricky gaps in the CV. Of course it doesn't end with getting a job. If you decide to disclose your mental health problems to your employers at interview and still get the job, you then have to decide whether it is safe to confide in colleagues. What are the answers? How do you advise someone on what to do? User consultants Mo Hutchison and Mary Nettle have run workshops on these questions at ‘Wicked Issues’ conferences on mental health and employment. The approach they have taken is to think through the issues involved with the participants and to devise a list of questions that people need to ask themselves before making the decision for themselves. This short article does not therefore provide answers, but it does provide a starting point for thinking things through — and hopefully for more discussion within the columns of A life in the day.

A member of the journal's editorial board reflects on the continuing contribution A Life in the Day makes towards national debates around mental health.

Joan lives in Denmark and we met at one of the European seminars Bob Grove writes about in the Editorial.

Here are three contributions from mental health service users who feel very positive about the help and support they have received. David is from Kent and works with the Shaw Trust, who believe in releasing the potential of disabled people. John and Nettie work with Restore, ‘a creative mental rehabilitation service’ in Oxford.

Sandra Smith is now a patient advocate. Her ‘day in the life’ causes her to reflect on her own experiences of using mental health services and her liberation as a self‐advocate and survivor.

In this account of a day in her life Rosemary Wilson describes some of the difficulties in bringing the strands of her life together and her own personal ‘strategies for living’. Her observations concerning the barriers faced by users who want to be involved in service development should be read and digested by all professionals wanting to work with users as partners.

Michael Rothwell was born in the 1960s and raised for the first ten years of his life in Africa. He was WASP — White Anglo‐Saxon Protestant. He had problems much later, and he writes now about his experiences in the 1980s and more recent times…