— Case studies / Surveys

Objective: In contrast, there is a shortage of narratives of researchers without experiential expertise, rendering their specific perspectives largely unaccounted for – a gap that is addressed in this paper.

Methods: The interpretative method of “interactive interviewing” is used to systematically reflect on how two researchers without experiential expertise perceived personal and emotional unsettlement in collaborative projects in the fields of Mental Health (MH) and Intellectual and Developmental Disability (IDD).

Results: Four cases are presented to illustrate and advocate the value of unsettling encounters in collaborative research. Underlying is the ethical and methodological position that collaborative research is primarily characterized by its potential to unsettle the relations between the people and parties involved. This position derives from the critical autobiography of the disability studies scholar Kathryn Church, and contrasts to the widely held assumption that collaborative research is largely characterized by a set of distinct methods or techniques.

Discussion: Some of the epistemic and methodological gains and challenges of approaching collaborative research as a means to facilitate and reflect on unsettling encounters are presented and discussed in relation to overarching theoretical and normative-ethical arguments.

Community Contribution: This paper purposefully lacks any form of involvement, explicitly focussing on the perspectives and experiences of researchers without experiential expertise in the context of collaborative research relationships.

Aim: To gain a snapshot of mental health researcher views on strategies for increasing research by or with consumers in mental health through the establishment of an Expert Consumer Researcher Group (ECRG).

Methods: Cross-sectional survey of 41 non-consumer mental health researchers from Australia or New Zealand.

Results: The introduction of an ECRG was considered an effective strategy for linking consumer and non-consumer researchers and providing specialist advice on research design and methodology. The most suitable location for this group was identified as within consumer advocacy agencies (71%), universities (66%) or research funding bodies (66%). Participants rated their likelihood of seeking advice from the ECRG as high.

Discussion: Research participants supported the value of an ECRG. They emphasized the importance of ensuring the group reflected a diversity of views and offered specialized expertise related to the specific topic. The ECRG could benefit both individual researchers and larger research organizations.

Implications for practice: An ECRG could facilitate collaborations with consumer researchers and in turn enhance the quality of mental health research.

A social science investigation of Australian mental health consumer and carer perspectives on research ethics procedures was conducted in two interlinked stages: (a) a discussion forum with consumers, carers, and lived-experience researchers and (b) indepth interviews with consumers and carers. Data collection and analysis drew strongly on methodological features of grounded theory. Privacy, confidentiality, and stigmatizing ethics procedures were key issues for consumer and carer participants. Recommendations for research practice include the following: considering the impact of information sharing on participants’ relationships and adopting individual-focused approaches to managing research risks.

Objectives: To explore and articulate how learning from community participatory approaches to research enable barriers to knowledge coproduction to be overcome in mental health research.

Setting: An evaluation of a primary care mental health service, led by an experienced survivor researcher, supported by a health service researcher and involving a team of community co‐researchers.

Design: Cycles of reflective writing (first‐person narrative) by the authors, and feed‐back from the co‐researcher team, on their experiences of undertaking the evaluation were used to explore the ways in which community actors, including those from marginalized communities, might be meaningfully involved in producing research knowledge about mental health services.

Results: A space was created where community co‐researchers, including those from traditionally marginalized communities, felt safe and empowered to move beyond essentialized “service user” identities and bring a range of skills and expertise to the evaluation. There was meaningful rebalancing of power between traditional university and community roles, although the issues around leadership remained complex and more could be done to explore how our different experiences of race and mental health shape the research we do.

Conclusions: Potential was demonstrated for participatory research approaches to inform coproduction of knowledge in mental health research that fully reflects the diversity of identity and experience.