This thesis arose out of my clinical practice as a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist. Recent government guidance had stressed that views of service users should play a substantial part in developing health service provision, but little work to date had explored the views of teenage users of mental health services. The first part of the thesis therefore constructed a frame within which to position studies of the views of teenage users of mental health services in a broader body of knowledge. A critical examination of user involvement in the NHS, relating this to the exercise of power, led into an examination of different perspectives on the doctor-patient relationship. This was followed by a consideration of different ways of conceptualising the nature of childhood, relating this specifically to the handful of published studies examining teenage client views of mental health services. As no in-depth qualitative studies were found that explored what it meant for young people to attend an out-patient adolescent psychiatry service, this study set out to answer the following question: o What did young people who had been referred to an outpatient adolescent psychiatry clinic make of that experience? In addition, the study explored to what extent there was variation among young people in their views, whether views changed over time and what respondents' suggestions were for improving outpatient adolescent psychiatry services. On the basis of an exploration of the philosophy of sociological enquiry, a qualitative methodology was adopted to pursue these questions, taking the position that one should start with young people's own accounts of what it had meant to go to a psychiatrist. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 41 young people recently discharged from two outpatient adolescent psychiatric clinics, 19 of whom came back for a repeat interview six months later. The interviews were understood within a social constructivist approach, and attention was paid to not just the hermeneutical interpretation of the text of interviews between researcher and respondent, but also to the contexts within which such dialogues took place. The way young people positioned themselves, and were positioned by others, formed a central component in understanding the accounts of the clinical encounter given by young people. Subjects presented themselves as active and purposive participants, both in their clinical encounters and in their interaction with the interviewer, and were able to give thoughtful and pertinent answers. Most respondents said they had been glad they attended the clinic, although clinicians rated the benefit of going higher than subjects themselves. Repeat interviews indicated that accounts about the meaning of going to a psychiatric clinic did not substantially change over a six month period. There was considerable variation in how respondents related to mental health services and this could be partly understood as resulting from differences in age, gender and mental health. Respondents regarded going to a psychiatric clinic as stigmatising and many said they kept their clinic attendance a secret from their peers for fear of being labelled mad and therefore shunned. Young people were primarily concerned with the effect of their clinic attendance on their moral standing with their peers and family, rather than the impact of a mental illness on their cognitive or emotional ability to deal with life's challenges. Many respondents said that the referral process itself, including a lack of information, the location and external appearance of the clinics, and the way entry into a clinic had to be negotiated, served to emphasise their new low status. The power to frame the therapeutic encounter was seen to lie almost entirely in the hands of the clinical staff, and the clinical encounter could leave respondents feeling objectified and classified.