Viewpoint

We're a charity that supports people who have a background in mental health as well as addiction challenges. By encouraging and inviting them to have their say, their feedback can go towards greatly improving mental health and addiction services.

Whether it's through courses, events or sharing their own experiences, whatever their story, we welcome them to become Viewpoint members so we can help support their mental health and addiction.

Information for volunteers

Viewpoint is a user involvement charity for people to share their personal experiences on drugs, alcohol and mental health in order to influence positive change.

We’re the only organisation of its kind in Hertfordshire that focuses on giving people a voice to influence change. Hearing firsthand from our users offers valuable advice that can help others. Through their expertise, this information can greatly help providers to make the biggest difference in peoples’ lives.

We achieve this by:

Representing our service users
Holding local forums and meetings
Hosting specialist workshops
Carrying out surveys and listening to user feedback
Providing training.
We offer training courses in many areas, for example, personality disorder, mental health first aid, impact of substance misuse and transgender awareness to name a few. This training is unique as it is provided by people with lived experience which makes it reflective and authentic.

We hold regular meetings and events for individuals who have used mental health services in Hertfordshire to provide and share their personal experiences and opinions, both good and bad, on the services in the area. We can organise for service users to input ideas, plans and documents to be fully involved in the decision making processes.