The title of our skit, “Involvement for dummies”, riffs off the famous book series aiming to present new topics for the lay person in a humorous and accessible way.
Our skit, featuring Raza Griffiths and Rachel Hill as wise but frustrated service users and Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh as a clueless practitioner, dramatises many of the issues around meaningful, as opposed to tokenistic, involvement. It is set in the form of a conversation between two people with lived experience, and a well-meaning but not altogether clued-up practitioner. The practitioner begins by patronising the two service users, revealing a lack of critically reflexive thought on the fundamental values underlying meaningful involvement, and how they challenge conventional hierarchies of knowledge and power dynamics separating mental health service users and practitioners. But, by the end of the skit, having taken on board the challenging lessons presented by the two service users, the practitioner is able to think more clearly about what involvement really looks like in practice.
We hope this skit's humorous take on some of the challenges and barriers to lived experience involvement in mental health research and how to overcome them, will be illuminating and instructive for anyone interested in involving people with lived experience in mental health research, whether in universities, charities or other organisations. We aimed to highlight that good mental health research needs the voices of people of lived experience to shape all aspects of research design in order for that research to really make a meaningful difference in the lives of people who experience mental health struggles. We hope we succeeded in showing this in a light-hearted yet poignant way!