Employment status, aspirations and perceptions of support amongst psychiatric service users in Pavia, Italy.

Aims: To describe the employment status of people using mental health service in Pavia, Italy; to explore their employment aspirations and perceptions of support to achieve these; and to test the feasibility of working with service users as researchers.

Method: Face to face interviews carried out by two service user researchers with a consecutive sample of 200 service users attending the local psychiatric outpatient department using a translated version of a questionnaire developed for previous UK surveys.

Results: A higher proportion of survey participants (42.