Collaborating with people with lived experience

“I belong here as much as anyone else, having lived my field of expertise 24/7 for 17 years”

Being a Lived Experience Practitioner allows me to use my past experiences to bring about change but there is still much to be done to appropriately value these roles going forward, says guest blogger Ellie Wildbore

Collaborating with people with lived experience

Public Involvement

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Using a peer research approach to evaluate women-led peer support

Peer research not only enriched the findings from the Women Side by Side evaluation, but it also brought mutual benefits to everyone involved, says Tanya MacKay

Women

Peer Support

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Women Side by Side has helped raise awareness of mental health in a BAME community

Evaluating and facilitating a women-led peer support programme as a peer meant that Fozia Haider was able to experience the benefit of the approach first-hand

Women

Peer Support

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Overcoming imposter syndrome as a peer researcher

Our blogger reveals how her experiences of observing women-led peer support groups during the Women Side by Side evaluation helped dispel fears of feeling like a fraud

Women

Peer Support

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Women Side by Side shows what can happen if women are given the space to grow

Naima Iqbal shares her experiences of evaluating a women-led peer support programme, including how spending time with the women helped her own confidence to grow

Women

Peer Support

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Involving peers can enrich research when it’s done right

What factors are important for peer researchers to have in common with research participants? We asked Sarah Markham, an advisory group member, about her involvement in the evaluation of Women Side by Side

Women

Peer Support

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Finding the right people to ask the right questions: new survey on young people’s mental health  
by Thomas Kabir

What do we really know about young people’s mental health? We know it’s a big issue. Around 1 in 10 young people have experienced a mental health difficulty. Around 75% of people with a mental health problem start developing it before the age of 18¹.

Children, young people and families

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Using Lived Experience in Evaluating Mental Health Peer Support
by Andreja Mesaric | Julie Billsborough | Rajvi Kotecha-Hazzard | Richard Currie | Sarah Gibson

This essay was originally published as the afterword to the early research findings of the evaluation of the Side by Side programme. In it the researchers who used their lived experience of mental health problems and peer support whilst working on the evaluation reflect on how including that expertise from experience strengthened the research. 

Collaborating with people with lived experience

Research methods

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Our Evaluation News

 

Over the last few weeks we’ve been giving our website a bit of a spring clean. As part of that we’ve added a new page showcasing the work we do for partner organisations including our work on evaluations. This is a growing part of what we do, helping other organisations to understand what impact their work is having and how it can be improved.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

Research methods

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Expertise from Experience in Peer Review – Dolly’s Experience
by Dolly Sen

Earlier in the year MHRUK asked for our help in reviewing applications for three PhD Studentships. They wanted to strengthen the peer review process by including reviewers who could contribute their expertise from experience. We asked Gary, Dolly and Ryan to reflect on their experience of acting as reviewers, and we publish their blogs here.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Expertise from Experience in Peer Review – Gary’s experience
by Gary Coyle

Earlier in the year MHRUK asked for our help in reviewing applications for three PhD Studentships. They wanted to strengthen the peer review process by including reviewers who could contribute their expertise from experience. We asked Gary, Dolly and Ryan to reflect on their experience of acting as reviewers, and we publish their blogs here.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Expertise from Experience in Peer Review – Ryan’s Experience
by Ryan Freeman

Earlier in the year MHRUK asked for our help in reviewing applications for three PhD Studentships. They wanted to strengthen the peer review process by including reviewers who could contribute their expertise from experience. We asked Gary, Dolly and Ryan to reflect on their experience of acting as reviewers, and we publish their blogs here.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Research in 2016
by Agnes Hann | Johanna Frerichs

To mark the end of 2016, we’re taking a look back at some of what the McPin team has learned over the past year.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

Research methods

Wellbeing and connectedness

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McPin Methods
by Ian Bradshaw

The 30th of November saw the first of what we will hope will be a series of methods workshops. It brought together over 70 researchers to discuss how to integrate ‘lived experience expertise in mental health research teams’. The event was massively oversubscribed and if the fact that we had to cut short discussions before we were physically kicked out of the venue is any guide, it succeeded in its aim of stimulating debate and the sharing of ideas.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

Public Involvement

Research methods

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Influencing the debate – peer research in academic journals
by Sarah Hamilton

A new special edition reporting findings from the Viewpoint survey was published in July. It includes a paper on our qualitative research into mental health discrimination experiences which was co-authored with four peer researchers. We reflect on the importance of experts by experience being named as authors, and why they are so often absent from peer reviewed journal articles.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

Inclusion and combating stigma

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Getting our Report Card – asking people what they think of you and acting on their responses, the Your Experience in Mind Survey
by Madeleine Musgrove

Research and Evaluation Officer, Mind

Mind have been working together with the McPin Foundation since 2014 to evaluate the experience of people using our federated local Minds through the annual ‘Your Experience in Mind’ survey. We have 146 local Minds across England and Wales providing over 50 different types of service.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

Improving mental health support

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Why did I take on the work with the McPin Foundation?
by Gary Coyle

In March this year I took on an exciting opportunity: working with The McPin Foundation as a Peer Project Assistant on a pilot scheme entitled ‘My Story, Our Future’. We will be exploring the stories of people who have themselves used or supported others accessing Early Intervention for Psychosis (EIP) services. 

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Peer Research and Complex Needs: A Mental Health Perspective
by Agnes Hann

Read a new blog about how research on people with complex needs are using an approach that we champion at the McPin Foundation – peer research. Written by Agnes, a senior researcher in our team, it looks at some of the challenges and benefits of peer involvement in research. It was written for Revolving Doors, a charity that supports people with complex needs including mental health issues. We are really proud to support their work exploring the role of peer - otherwise known as experts by experience - contribution to research.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Reflections from working on an evaluation project: Your Experience in Mind
by Julie Billsborough

We are keen to look at new ways of involving mental health service users and carers in research. Part of our commitment to developing new approaches has been to investigate the things that have worked well and not so well about the methods we have tried in our own research and evaluation studies. We will publish a series of methods papers describing our work. Our first methods paper describes the 'Survey Champion' approach used in an evaluation of Local Minds.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

Improving mental health support

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Reflections from 10 years of service user and survivor research event
by McPin Foundation

On Monday (1st June, 2015), St George's University of London celebrated 10 years of doing service user and survivor research with a fantastic day of discussions attended by many inspirational leaders in mental health research, from a lived experience perspective. Three of us from the McPin Foundation attended. In one of the sessions, Sarah Carr, Peter Beresford, Diana Rose and Jayasaree Kalathil reflected on the place of collaborative and survivor research in Universities. Is it safe in universities?    

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Does service user involvement in research make a difference?

A major interest of the McPin Foundation is how service user and carer involvement in mental health research, reaching beyond taking part as participants, improves any project. It is a topic that is of interest to research funders as well, with programmes of research being commissioned by the NIHR to answer this question.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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Doing PPI better: why we are always learning
by Sarah Hamilton

Last week, I attended a fantastic conference on Patient and Public Involvement in Exeter, organised by the South Peninsula CLAHRC.

The conference was a very inspiring event with a wide variety of researchers, practitioners and people who have used health services and are engaged in Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in research.

Collaborating with people with lived experience

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