Ended up getting what I wanted with:
import unittest
from testAdditional import UserTestCase #Where my unittest was defined
suite=unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(UserTestCase)
testResult = unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(suite)
response_data['nrFailed'] = len(testResult.failures)
response_data['output'] = "{}{}".format('\n'.join([result[1] for result in testResult.errors]),'\n'.join([result[1] for result in testResult.failures]))
response_data['totalTests'] = testResult.testsRun