Designed to Clash? Reflecting on the Practical, Personal, and Structural Challenges of Collaborative Research in Psychiatry

Abstract

Background: In the field of mental health research, collaborative and participatory approaches in which mental health service users actively contribute to academic knowledge production are gaining momentum. However, concrete examples in scientific literature that would detail how collaborative research projects are actually organized, and how they deal with the inherent challenges are rare. This paper provides an in-depth description of a three-year collaborative project that took place in the wider context of a mixed-method process evaluation of innovative models of psychiatric care in Germany.Methods: The in-depth description we provide here draws on a vast body of notes and records that originated from numerous meetings and sessions. The research group continuously and systematically reflected on their collaboration itself using the interpretative method of “interactive interviewing,” which included that also the personal memories of the researchers were collectively re-discussed before and during the process of writing. Our concrete experiences as a group were then contextualized with and analyzed in the light of more general challenges that are central to collaborative research in general.Results: Performing collaborative research requires unconventional thinking and improvisation in order to find creative solutions for practical problems and to overcome the structural obstacles inherent to the process of academic knowledge production. An atmosphere of mutual trust and respect within the group is crucial, and continuous self-reflection or supervision can be largely beneficial. Challenges mainly originate from the vast heterogeneity that characterizes the researchers, usually including large differences in economic, cultural, and social capital.Conclusion: Collaborative research in the field of psychiatry is designed to bring together researchers with widely diverse backgrounds. Emerging conflicts are important parts of knowledge production but also exceptional opportunities to negotiate research ethics, and potential vehicles for personal growth and transformation. Success or failure of collaborative research largely depends on how divergences and conflicts are articulated, mediated, and reflected. This also holds true in the light of the power asymmetries within the research team and the structural power inherent to the engines of academic knowledge production.

Needs and Experiences in Psychiatric Treatment (NEPT)- Piloting a Collaboratively Generated, Initial Research Tool to Evaluate Cross-Sectoral Mental Health Services

“…During these supervisory sessions, the collaborative approach and its impact on the research results were reflected upon. The results of this work will be published elsewhere (32). The whole team contributed to all phases of this project, and also as authors of this paper.…”

“…A detailed description of the teams' collaborating processes and experiences while conducting this study has been published elsewhere (32). As described above, staffing the team with a mix of researchers with and without experiential expertise, organizing our work in different sub-groups and tandems, made it possible to systematically incorporate experiential expertise throughout the whole research process.…”

“…This led to a rather disciplined form of experiential expertise coming into play, that stretched the standard criteria of health service research and/or psychiatric discourse but ended up subjugating its emancipatory potential to the authority of scientific knowledge and academic knowledge production. Longstanding, structural inequalities of university knowledge production as well as rather strict (mental) health service research epistemologies remained largely untouched, leading to various frustrations especially on the side of the researchers with experiential expertise [for further details see Beeker et al (32)].…”

Psychiatrization in mental health care: The emergency department

“…In this context, several measures which aim at countering some of the negative effects of psychiatrization have been suggested or applied on a relatively small scale, such as introducing stepped diagnosis (Batstra and Frances, 2012c), implementing open dialogue as a less psychiatrizing means of psychosocial support (von Peter et al, 2021), advocating alternative frameworks to psychiatric diagnosis (Baumgardt and Weinmann, 2022), limiting the influence of psychiatric corporate interest and pharmaceutical companies (Frances, 2013;Cosgrove and Whitaker, 2015) or, with a growing importance, fostering user-involvement in research and care (Gillard et al, 2010;Wright and Kongats, 2018;Beeker et al, 2021b). Nevertheless, a far wider array of aspects of psychiatrization has been described in non-medical disciplines, such as anthropology, critical psychology, sociology or Mad Studies, using different theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and terminologies (LeFrançois et al, 2013;Behrouzan, 2016;Jain and Orr, 2016;Russo and Sweeney, 2017).…”

Wie erleben Nutzer*innen die Versorgung? Vom Mehrwert partizipativ-kollaborativer Forschung

“…Die kollaborative Zusammenarbeit hat uns Teammitgliedern viel abverlangt [19]. Teilweise stark abweichende Perspektiven wurden in den Austausch gebracht.…”