Introduction
The theme of the World Health Organisation’s World Mental Health Day 2026 is “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change”. This theme highlights the importance of listening to people with lived mental health experiences to inform policy, advocacy, and service reform.
Service user involvement in research used to be where individuals would be described as the “subjects” of research, implying a sense of exposure and even subjugation in a setting where the power lies with the experimenter. In recent years the Department of Health, the National Health Service (NHS) Executive, research charities and funding bodies have emphasised the importance of user involvement in clinical research because users have ‘the experience and skills to complement those of current researchers...they know what it feels like to undergo treatments and their various side effects...they will have a good idea about what research questions should be asked...and how questions might be asked differently’ (Goodare & Lockward, 1999), and ‘if the needs and views of users are reflected in research it is more likely to produce results that can be used to improve clinical practice’ (Department of Health, 2000). Many clinical researchers therefore want to involve users in their research but are often unclear exactly how to go about this.
The event will be equivalent to 1hr of CPD.
Content
This webinar will focus on the experience of working together with user-researchers and people with lived mental health experiences for meaningful and authentic co-production. The steps in the partnership research process will be described alongside the challenges that can be faced along the way. The webinar aims to help others become more aware of the complexities of co-production in mental health research and of its many benefits to us all. Partnership working in this way is in keeping with WHO’s initiative on deinstitutionalisation and community-based mental healthcare.
Learning Objectives
The aim of this webinar is to help participants to understand:
• the difference between participation, engagement, and involvement
• the five types on involvement
• why lived experience in research is important
• the benefits of Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in research
Training Modalities
Didactic.
Key References
Wykes T. Great expectations for participatory research: what have we achieved in the last ten years? World Psychiatry. 2014 Feb;13(1):24-7. doi: 10.1002/wps.20086. PMID: 24497239; PMCID: PMC3918010.
Wykes, T., & Molloy, N. (2025). How to write the “involving people with lived experience” section of an article. Journal of Mental Health, 34(5), 511–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638237.2025.2558502
Molloy N, Kilcoyne I, Belcher H, Wykes T. Exploring the involvement of people with lived experience of mental disorders in co-developing outcome measures: a systematic review. Lancet Psychiatry. 2025 Feb;12(2):140-152. doi: 10.1016/S2215-0366(24)00376-6. PMID: 39848731.
Rose D, Evans J, Sweeney A, Wykes T. A model for developing outcome measures from the perspectives of mental health service users. Int Rev Psychiatry. 2011;23(1):41-6. doi: 10.3109/09540261.2010.545990. PMID: 21338297.
Wykes T, Csipke E, Rose D, Craig T, McCrone P, Williams P, Koeser L, Nash S. Patient involvement in improving the evidence base on mental health inpatient care: the PERCEIVE programme. Southampton (UK): NIHR Journals Library; 2018 Dec. PMID: 30566316.
Rose D, Evans J, Laker C, Wykes T. Life in acute mental health settings: experiences and perceptions of service users and nurses. Epidemiol Psychiatr Sci. 2015 Feb;24(1):90-6. doi: 10.1017/S2045796013000693. Epub 2013 Dec 16. PMID: 24330951; PMCID: PMC6998224.
Csipke E, Williams P, Rose D, Koeser L, McCrone P, Wykes T, Craig T. Following the Francis report: investigating patient experience of mental health in-patient care. Br J Psychiatry. 2016 Jul;209(1):35-9. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.115.171124. Epub 2016 Mar 17. PMID: 26989098; PMCID: PMC4929406.
Wykes T, Evans J, Paton C, Barnes TRE, Taylor D, Bentall R, Dalton B, Ruffell T, Rose D, Vitoratou S. What side effects are problematic for patients prescribed antipsychotic medication? The Maudsley Side Effects (MSE) measure for antipsychotic medication. Psychol Med. 2017 Oct;47(13):2369-2378. doi: 10.1017/S0033291717000903. Epub 2017 Apr 19. PMID: 28420450; PMCID: PMC5820531.
Evans J, Rose D, Flach C, Csipke E, Glossop H, McCrone P, Craig T, Wykes T. VOICE: developing a new measure of service users' perceptions of inpatient care, using a participatory methodology. J Ment Health. 2012 Feb;21(1):57-71. doi: 10.3109/09638237.2011.629240. PMID: 22257131; PMCID: PMC4018995.
About the presenter
Dame Til Wykes is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London, and a consultant clinical psychologist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.
She is the Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Lead at the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre: Maudsley.
She champions Patient and Public Involvement and founded the renowned Service User Research Enterprise which employs excellent researchers with experience of using mental health services.
Her influence has been recognised by the British Psychological Society (2014), a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDTM for the Largest Mental Health Lesson, a Damehood from the Queen (2016) and by the EPA for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in Working to Improve Mental Health Care in Europe.
Who should attend
This free event has been recorded to mark World Mental Health Day 2026 with the theme ‘Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change’. The webinar is likely to be of interest to anyone working in mental health who is looking to increase lived experience involvement in the work they do.
Low Intensity clinical contact hours survey - BABCP Low Intensity Special Interest Group
Please click below if you are interested in contributing to the survey.
The BACP Low Intensity SIG are interested in the impact of clinical contact hours on Low Intensity/Wellbeing Practitioner wellbeing. This questionnaire contains six multi-choice questions and a free text box for you to share your experiences. The answers to these questions will help the BABCP SIG plan how to meet CPD topics and other developments within the SIG. The SIG hope to produce a write up of the answers to this questionnaire to be shared with SIG members and to be used in training.
This FREE conference is for Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners working in Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression services and is brought to you by Bespoke Mental Health in collaboration with the NHS National PWP Leads Network.
This is a FREE conference for Mental Health Wellbeing Practitioners (or equivalent) working in NHS secondary care. This full day event includes a Keynote Address by Dr Adrian Whittington, National Clinical Lead for Psychological Professions at NHS England, a Panel Discussion, two Clinical Skills Classes, two Research Presentations and an optional 15-minute Q&A Session focusing on BABCP registration and accreditation.