Angela Sweeney Editor

Jasna Russo comes from former Yugoslavia and is based in Berlin, Germany where she works as an independent researcher. She is a long-term activist in the international user/survivor movement. Jasna has an MA in clinical psychology and has worked on both survivor-controlled and collaborative research projects, including several large-scale international studies. Her articles have been published in anthologies and journals in Germany and the UK. In 2011 Jasna was the main organiser of the international conference "Searching for a Rose Garden. Fostering Real Alternatives to Psychiatry" which inspired this book. Her main interest is in exploring the accumulated knowledge of people treated as mad or 'mentally ill' and whether we can connect across the globe to jointly develop our own, first-person defined model of madness. Angela Sweeney was part of her local survivor movement as a teenager and young adult, and conducted her first survivor research project as an undergraduate student in 1998. Sometime after graduating, she joined the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health to work with Jan Wallcraft on a study of the British Survivor Movement (On Our Own Terms, 2003) before moving to the Service User Research Enterprise at the Institute of Psychiatry where she gained a PhD in medical sociology. She has a particular interest in survivor controlled research, trauma-informed approaches, survivors' perspectives on and experiences of psychiatric services and treatments, and alternatives to mainstream biomedical psychiatry including trauma and social models of causation. She is currently undertaking a five year Post-Doctoral Fellowship exploring assessment processes for talking therapies. She has two young children, a partner, and a cat.