With the help of a two-day workshop, mental health workers and service users collaborated to take a fresh look at psychosis. Philip Houghton and colleagues describe what the participants found most useful

Psychosis Revisited (Basset et al 2003) is a two-day workshop for mental health workers that encourages and enables participants to take a fresh look at psychosis. It also aims to help workers think about how they can work effectively with people who are distressed by their psychotic experiences. The workshop is based on the British Psychological Society’s innovative report Understanding Mental Illness: recent advances in understanding mental illness and psychotic experiences (BPS 2000). This moves beyond the traditionally narrow view of psychotic experiences as primarily a symptom of illness treated by medication, to a broader approach which incorporates many different ways of understanding psychosis. The workshops also encourage a fresh approach by incorporating and prioritising user-led sessions and involvement as part of the training (see Hayward and Basset 2002, Hayward et al 2005a; for further details regarding the initial development of the workshop).