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The quality of therapeutic relationships in psychiatric services has a significant impact upon the therapeutic outcomes for people diagnosed with a severe mental illness. As previous work has not explicitly explored service users’ in‐depth views about the emotional impact of these relationships, the objective of this work was to bring this perspective to the fore and to gain a greater understanding about which relational components can lead to psychological change.

The project was conducted alongside a service user organization. An interview design was used to qualitatively explore service users’ experiences and perceptions of their relationships with mental health practitioners.

Eight individuals who had experience of the mental health system in the United Kingdom were interviewed. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyse the data.

Three …