— Discussion and Analysis

It relies on the creation of a safe environment where power imbalances are acknowledged and mitigated, and decisions are made collaboratively. Understanding how to do this effectively within the mental health sphere, where experiences of uneven power distribution and trauma are common, can feel overwhelming. Building a shared understanding of the opportunities and limitations within co-design is also important to establish its place within broader mental health reform. This paper uses an experiential approach to reflect on a co-design process, offering an opportunity to learn from a specific example. Factors that enhanced co-design included formal, remunerated roles, the allocation of time to establish and maintain an intimate, trusting team culture, and the capacity for all team members to be vulnerable. Equally important, strategies needed to be employed to mitigate the challenges inherent within the process, including the impact of power differences, a push to make fast-paced decisions, and a sense of cynicism remaining from previous projects or experiences. When these factors are attended to, the process of co-design can be dynamic, innovative, and transformational for the people participating in it, the project and the mental health sector.

We show the enduring impact of these notions in producing and perpetuating the power dynamics between professionals, researchers, policy makers and service users within privileged sites of knowledge production, whereby those deemed to lack reason—the mad and the racialized mad in particular—and their knowledge are radically inferiorised. Articulating problems in what is considered knowledge and methods of knowing, we argue that modern “psy” sciences instantiates the privilege of reason as well as of whiteness. We then examine how the survivor movement, and the emergent survivor/mad knowledge base, duplicates white privilege even as it interrogates privileges of reason and cognition. Describing how we grapple with these issues in an ongoing project—EURIKHA—which aims to map the knowledge produced by service users, survivors and persons with psychosocial disabilities globally, we offer some suggestions. Coproduction between researchers, policy makers and those of us positioned as mad, particularly as mad people of color, we argue, cannot happen in knowledge production environments continuing to operate within assumptions and philosophies that privilege reason as well as white, Eurocentric thinking. We seek not to coproduce but to challenge and change thinking and support for psychosocial suffering in contexts local to people's lives.

This year, researchers of the University of Edinburgh and the University of Strathclyde brought us a book (The Impact Agenda) that discusses a great many issues around the role of research and the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF). For anyone involved in co-production, the book’s focus on research impact is very useful, as are the discussions in it. Is it still true, as the traditional view suggests, that impact is the benefit of research to society? Are there alternative methods for research to serve society, and if so, how do individual academics feel about those alternatives?