Dancing to our own tunes: Reassessing black and minority ethnic mental health service user involvement (original) (raw)
Related papers
Service users: Individualised involvement or collective action?
A Life in the Day, 2008
This is an important time to be taking stock of mental health service user/survivor campaigning and involvement. Big changes are taking place in social care. These will also impact on developments taking place in mental health services, with the plan to trial personal budgets in the National Health Services announced in Lord Darzi's report in July 2008. This article details the past, present and future of the survivor movement from Peter Beresford's personal point of view.
Involving ethnically diverse service users in the research process: alliances and action
Involving service users in research is widely promoted as good practice ). Relatively little, however, has been written about involvement of black and minority ethnic (BME) mental health service users in the research process or the involvement of service users in the technical intricacies of projects such as systematic reviews. What commentary there is suggests that the relationships between academics and black and minority ethnic peer researchers, universities and communities, can present a difficult terrain for forging authentic and productive research alliances. In this chapter we discuss some of the practical and conceptual challenges arising from aspirations to be more inclusive of minority ethnic individuals in the research process.
Chapter 37 How can we survive and thrive as Survivor Researchers?
The Routledge Handbook of Service User Involvement in Human Services Research and Education. ISBN 0367523566, 2020
This chapter documents the impact of undertaking research-related activities asking the overarching question, ‘How can we survive and thrive as survivor researchers?’ A brief summary of the Survivor Researcher Network (SRN) is given and the impact of the current context of austerity in the United Kingdom (UK) outlined. Following this, the 4Pi National Involvement Standards (4Pi-NIS) developed by the National Survivor User Network (NSUN) (2015) act as the starting point in this critical reflection. The addition of further P’s to the 4Pi-NIS relating to issues of privilege, power, parity and progression in survivor-led research processes are discussed. In addition, a number of autoethnographic poems, collectively known as Expanded I poems (Lovell, 2017), are interspersed throughout the body of the text to support the issues raised, placing lived experience firmly at the top of the hierarchy of evidence presented. Building on Gilligan et al.’s (2003) voice-centred relational data analysis process, the poems are constructed from our spoken words to foster critical reflection across personal (I), interpersonal (you), objectified (it), group (we) and community (they) levels of experience. These Expanded I poems function as an ‘alternative performance’ (Madison, 2006, p. 322) to both explore and illustrate issues raised in aiming to ‘resist the repetitive and hegemonic power to reinscribe identity and value’. Our hope in doing so is to heighten readers’ awareness of the systemic and other changes needed for us to both survive and thrive as survivor researchers. This is of critical importance when working with and indeed in the current hierarchical neoliberal societies in which we reside and over which we have little or, more often than not, no control. Four projects are described that reflect resistance in action, including: MaDCaff and their peer-led performance cafes in community spaces across Wales; the democratisation of knowledge in commissioning services; decolonising history through play production; and crit-walking with White privilege and supremacy in youth education. Lastly, we outline our intention to remain ‘in difficulty’ (Maileo, 2017, n.p.) with ourselves in relation to our ‘Whiteliness’ (Tate and Page, 2018, p. 141) and other areas of intersectional inequity as SRN members. We commence with a discussion of equality as it relates to SRN and the impact a sustained period of austerity has had upon diverse disabled people residing in the UK.
Empowering Mental Health Research: User Led Research into the Care Programme Approach
2004
Within the context of a developing user led research movement, at a time when we are developing values and principles that are informing this work, a group of service users and survivors set out to undertake the task of discovering the effectiveness of the Care Programme Approach in Northamptonshire. We found that locally the Care Programme Approach was failing in all areas. At the very least, however, there is now have a baseline from which to evaluate the improvements that we are seeking. By undertaking this work we have also created a user led research team, open to service users and survivors who have an interest in research. We have an identity - we call ourselves ASSURT (Action by Survivors and Service Users Research Team.). We are currently undertaking the task of evaluating the effectiveness of CPA in Northamptonshire for a second time as compared to the baseline findings. We have also earned some credibility as researchers, are invited to provide independent evaluation of n...
2005
The study was funded by the Welsh Office of Research and Development (WORD). A total of one hundred and forty-two people took part in this study and we are grateful and thankful for the time they gave us. Twenty-three co-applicants who signed up to the study during the initial proposal phase provided guidance and support throughout the life of the study. The co-applicants gave their time freely and the Research team thanks them for the interest they demonstrated. I would like to especially thank the Research team. Their involvement ensured that the key deliverables were met. We also thank Jaynie Rance and Gillian Olumide, who analysed and drafted a detailed summary of a significant number of the stakeholder questionnaires.