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Objective: The article describes how the psychiatric department at Aalborg University Hospital has used user-managed fitness dance as a way to create a disease-free space that allows groups of patients or patients and caregivers to meet eye to eye. The project began in October 2013 and is still ongoing. Method: The concept for user-controlled fitness dance was developed in cooperation with a young woman with psychiatric user experience and tested at the outpatient clinic for youth with schizophrenia (OPUS) in the North Denmark Region. The concept involves gatherings between admitted patients and day patients and between patients and caregivers. Patients and caregivers meet once a week to dance. The dance is led by a psychiatric ward user with many years of experience as both a hospitalised and day patient. Findings: Fitness dance forms the framework for a disease-free space, where the rallying point is neither diagnosis nor medicine, but the desire to break a sweat together with others, where everyone participates equal on equal terms. The instructor's background lowered the barriers for participation among patients, who, despite known difficulties with exercise and joint activities, participated week after week. Female patients, in particular, participated for a longer period. Men were difficult to involve and retain over time, which was also true of caregivers. Several caregivers were resistant and expressed scepticism about dance as an alternative form of treatment. Conclusion: Fitness dance comprises a space where patients can gather in connection with an activity. Dance is safe, involves no commitment, and opens up for dialogue on difficult topics among patients and among patients and fitness instructors. Based on caregivers' scepticism, the concept raises the question what good treatment is from a user perspective in medically dominated psychiatry.

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