This book was inspired by the Scottish service that provides advocacy to help people with mental health or learning difficulties. Advocacy for these and other groups began earlier in other countries of the UK, but nowhere else is there the free and independent nationwide service that is to be found in Scotland. When I first got involved, staff of the agency I joined asked where they could find opportunities for further training and professional development. Few were available. No surprise there: the academy always lags about a decade behind new developments in the field because their teachers need a shelf of books to read before they can offer a course, and it takes time to do the research and writing that creates this literature.

So we said, “Let's write our own book”. We worked on it in small meetings of advocates held in various parts of the territory our agency serves: a territory including old industrial towns, comfortable suburbs, and smaller communities scattered among mountains, lochs and islands; a territory with a population of nearly 200,000 people and a coastline longer than the coast of France. Very Scottish.

Central among the readers for whom we have written the book are people working as advocates or preparing to do so in Scotland or elsewhere. We hope our book will also be helpful to users of the mental health services, to those who care for them, the professionals who try to help them, and anyone interested in the broader development of the health and social services.

Our advocates brought anonymous but real cases to discuss with their colleagues at our meetings. To these we added a few others from colleagues working elsewhere in the same cause. I brought draft chapters, which were freely criticised and, in 18 months we created this book. We also sought the help of others who are expert in this field and asked some of them to comment on the whole draft or on particular chapters of it.

We could not have written the book without the help of our clients. Some of them wrote their own stories for us. Others gave their advocates permission to do this for them. We are grateful to them all. To protect confidentiality we have disguised these stories with small changes that preserve their essential truths.