Diana Rose was born and brought up in Aberdeen in the Northeast of Scotland. It was not a fully capitalist economy – it was partly feudal and not all cash. She attended Aberdeen University and then moved to London and got a job working in sociolinguistics at London University. After that she spent 10 years as a lecturer in a then-Polytechnic teaching social psychology, the sexual division of labour and anthropology.
She was a founding editor of the radical psychology journal “Ideology and Consciousness”. She was medically retired due to mental distress and spent 10 years on welfare benefits ‘living in the community’. She became involved in the English user / survivor movement, a life-changing moment for her. She also did a PhD part-time. Her local user group did a project on people moving out of the local asylum and on the back of that she secured a part-time job at the research department of a London NGO. There they did one of the first user-led projects on people living in the community with ‘high-level input’. A group of 10 service users – none of them had finished school – interviewed their peers and the project caused something of a stir in mainstream circles.
In 2001 she moved to the then Institute of Psychiatry to co-ordinate the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE). This was a team of people who had used mental health services and were also researchers. There were also Advisory Groups that people could get involved with and there was work with the local community. Some of the projects and other work are described in this website. Without really knowing it, she climbed the greasy pole and to her surprise was made Professor of User-Led Research at what was now the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (the name change signifies a change in perspective). She retired in 2021 and is now Honorary Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University. She mostly lives in France now.
You can contact Diana via email at diana.rose@orange.fr .