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The purpose of this paper is to describe processes of learning from personal experiences of mental distress when mental health service users participate in occupational therapy education with tutors and students who have also had experiences of mental distress.

A post-structural theoretical perspective was applied to stories which emerged from the research process. Semi-structured group and individual interviews were used with three service users, three students and three tutors (including the author) who had all had, at some time in their lives, experiences of mental distress.

Stories based on previously hidden personal experiences of mental distress began to shift dominant understandings. Further, as educators, service users challenged whose authority it is to speak about mental distress and permitted different narrative positions for students and tutors. However, technologies of power and technologies of self of powerful discourses in professional education continued to disqualify and exclude personal knowledges. Learning from stories requires a critical approach to storytelling to expose how hidden power relations maintain some knowledges as dominant. Further, learning requires narrative work, which was often hidden and unaccounted for, to navigate complex and contradictory positions in learning.

Although storytelling based on personal experience can help develop a skilled and healthy mental health workforce, its impact will be limited without changes in classrooms, courses and higher education which support learning at the margins of personal/professional and personal/political learning.

Learning from stories of mental distress requires conditions which take account of the hidden practices which operate in mental health professional education.

There is growing acknowledgement that companies are engaging in both transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing activity. However, apart from a small body of work, little consideration has been paid to the management and implementation challenges involved in conducting both types of marketing concurrently. In particular, there have been few studies that consider, from a holistic organisational perspective, how transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing management‐decision making impact on each other in reality and the extent to which organisations are investing appropriate resources in simultaneously implementing the two approaches. This article reports on a longitudinal, in‐depth study of a high‐street retail bank. The findings indicate that, in practice, resource investment in transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing management was unbalanced with an over‐emphasis on some managerial dimensions and an under‐investment in others. In other words the bank under investigation did not engage in effective transaction or relationship planning or implementation but rather the managerial and organisational focus was on sales and promotion.

Recently there has been an increased interest in the business case for equal opportunities. It has been argued that employers are attracted to such a case as it focuses on the business benefits which accrue from equal opportunities strategies. Presents a cautiously critical analysis of the attractiveness of the business case and its implications for women managers. States that the emergence of the business case has significantly changed the discourse and frames of reference through which issues of equal opportunity are now addressed. Considers the consequences of this shift for women managers.

Oppressed peoples have always told stories in which they shared images of themselves as powerful and free. Visions and prophecies and stories have shown people what is possible, what is yet to come, what our deepest selves are capable of.