How we all benefit from mental health research

A blog by Libby Warman, undergraduate placement student with the Sussex Partnership Research and Development Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) team.

Hi, I'm Libby and this World Mental Health Day, I'm going to tell you a bit about what it is like to get into a career in mental health research as a young person.

All too often research is seen as a process which happens behind closed doors; reserved for the academics and doctors who have trained for years to become masters of their fields. Understandably, this concept can be quite daunting for anybody early in their career looking for a way in.

Working with the PPI team over the last seven months has completely dispelled this idea. Absolutely anyone can give something valuable to research, whether you are an esteemed professor or someone who has previously never really given it a second thought. As someone with their own lived experience of mental health, the combination of dealing with this and the limited work experience an undergraduate has access to seemed like a pretty major roadblock in starting my career.

Again, my role in the PPI team helped me reframe my thinking around this. Lived experience is something that practically everyone has in some form or another, and everyone is able to use what they have gone through to provide a totally unique insight which is invaluable to the research process. Including people with lived experience helps make research more informed and relevant, and this is definitely the most important thing I will take forward from my time in SPFT.

In terms of my own personal journey, I joined this role having very little clarity as to what I was going to do when I left university. I think that pursuing a career in mental health in the NHS can be especially confusing. There are so many job roles and it can be hard to understand what is expected from you to be able to be successful (at least, that is definitely my experience!). However, I feel so incredibly lucky that being a part of the R&D department has put me in contact with a multitude of different professionals who have been absolute stars in giving myself and the other placement students advice on how to go forward. Alongside getting to work with so many interesting people, this placement has really highlighted to me that a career in research looks different to everybody- you can be a nurse, a PPI advisor, a peer researcher or a clinical psychologist and use your passion for mental health to contribute in different valuable ways.

One of the main things that I have been focusing on is our Youth PPI Café- maintaining our 16-15 year-old group and developing our 11-15 year-old café. Researchers bring questions about their studies (targeted towards young people) to the café, and our advisors can share their thoughts and feelings whilst being fully listened to and valued. It is a really lovely thing to be a part of, researchers get really insightful and creative advice from the people their work will actually effect, and the young people involved get to learn about current psychological research whilst developing essential transferrable skills like critical thinking.

It is genuinely really inspiring to see young people getting excited about psychology research, and serves as a good reminder as to why I wanted to get into the psychological professions in the first place.

Although I don't know what the future holds in terms of my career, working in R&D has shown me just how multifaceted research is, and I would love to be able to build upon the incredible work my colleagues are doing one day. If I could encourage anyone reading this to do one thing- talk to young people about your research! You might be the person who inspires them to take that first step.

Libby wrote this blog for World Mental Health Day. This year's theme set by the World Federation of Mental Health, is workplace mental health, which highlights the importance of addressing mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, for the benefit of people, organisations, and communities.