WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
Because lived experience is essential
for research to be meaningful and to effectively serve the people concerned.
The people who fund, conduct, and publish research are recognising this. People with lived and living experience have long been calling for this inner, first-person perspective on mental health to change how we do research – and our calls have been echoed: it is becoming more and more common, often required, for lived experience to be integrated in mental health research.
In that, we saw a risk.
We saw the rise of a new tick-box: the lived experience box, often referred to as the 'PPI' box.
In that, we saw the risk that lived experience could be imprisoned in the four walls of the tick-box, unable to expand. At best, this improves research but its growth is limited. At worst, this perpetuates inequality by enabling the same structural powers that once benefitted from exclusion to now profit from inclusion instead. Either way, hierarchies of power and knowledge remain largely unchanged. And it is time they changed.
In that, we also saw an opportunity.
Instead of getting comfortable with the new 'lived experience box', we can seek what is beyond the box and imagine new spaces for lived experience to exist in mental health research. In that, we saw an opportunity for people from across the world to come together to reflect on where we have got to, what knowledge we have and what we are missing, what differences and debates exist, what challenges we are facing, and what new paths forward we can collectively create.
This is how The Lancet Psychiatry Commission came to be.
