Citizen Science and Youth Mental Health: Co-creating Future Research

Youth mental health is a global priority challenge. Meeting this challenge will require mental health researchers to involve young people, not merely as participants in their studies or recipients of their findings, but as partners and leaders in their own right. This requires the innovation of citizen science, to adopt radically different ways of working with young people, that empower them to contribute equally throughout the research process. Beyond the direct impacts of enhancing both researchers and young peoples' knowledge and skills, this can ensure more relevant, accessible and impactful research is conducted and communicated.

Through Youth LIVES (Youth Lived experience of Evidence Synthesis), a UKRI-funded Citizen Science Collaboration award, we have brought together young people, as citizen scientists with lived experience of mental health problems, with mental health researchers, to work together through a programme of workshops to discover evidence gaps and to co-create mental health based research proposals that meet the needs and priorities of young people themselves. 

As a result of the project, there have been two levels of unique contribution to knowledge: firstly, research proposals that provide new, innovative, and relevant angles on mental health research, with new research insights developing from the youth co-researchers lived experience and perspectives. Secondly, the contribution of learning from the project itself, where the embedded formative and summative evaluation process has enabled us to capture and share our learning about participatory methods with communities in mental health research, policy and practice.

Although there are many perceived benefits to embedding co-creation within mental health research, in the current UK climate there are also significant barriers to conducting citizen science within research institutions. This talk will explore both the contribution citizen science can make to mental health research, alongside the challenges this method poses.