This is such an important book. Not only does it comprehensively address one of the most vexed issues concerning the social model of disability, but it also illustrates both the way in which the field of disability studies has developed extraordinary breadth and depth in the last decade or so, and the exciting potential for further research, analysis, policy and practice development.

It is a regrettable fact that, in the early days of the development of the social model, the emphasis (sometimes unspoken) was very much on physical impairment. Those of us with physical impairments who found the social model so liberating did so because it enabled us to move away from seeing our impairment as the problem and instead to focus on social, economic, attitudinal and environmental barriers. The social model gave us the possibility of changing things for the better – we couldn't change impairment but we could change society.

Over the last 30 years or so, the voices of a wide range of people who experience discrimination and exclusion, of those who use various forms of support, have got stronger. As disabled people’s, and survivors’ organisations, self-advocacy groups, coalitions and campaigns have become more prominent in public debate, more influential in driving policy and service improvements, we have also been in dialogue with each other – although we have sometimes not put as much effort into these dialogues as perhaps we should have.

It has taken this book to fully bring home to me why the terms ‘disabled’ and ‘disability’ can be so oppressive and frightening to some people who use mental health services And to understand that one of the problems with our use of the social model has been the tendency of some of us to take impairment for granted. For many people, as illustrated by some of the chapters in this book, ‘impairment’, ‘illness’, ‘medical condition’, ‘disorders’ are problematic terms in themselves. Can the social model encompass analysis, not only of disabling barriers, but also of ‘impairment’? What are the implications when impairment ceases to be neutral, when the terminology associated with the social model can feel offensive and to belong to an oppressive social context instead of being a liberating way of describing one's place in the world.