PLOS Mental Health Lived Experience Focus Group: How is it shaping our journal?

At the beginning of April, PLOS Mental Health held the first Lived Experience Focus Group meetings. The sessions were pivotal moments for PLOS Mental Health and will help to shape some of what we do moving forward. 

We are so grateful to all members of the group for their generosity and invaluable insight. Although we cannot share everything that was discussed during the sessions due to confidentiality, we would like to share some of the key themes that we hope to be able to deliver on as the journal continues to develop. In particular, we would like to share which topics PLOS Mental Health would like to commit to amplifying alongside previously communicated priorities.

• Mental Health in LGBTQ+ communities
  • PLOS Mental Health has published a number of articles that explore the needs and barriers that are specific to these communities (see below). However we will continue to encourage submissions that are relevant to this topic and ensure that we evolve the ways in which we promote these and stimulate discussions to help drive change.
    
• Interactions between physical and mental health
  • PLOS Mental Health will commit to holding a space for conversations surrounding the impact of chronic illness and disability experiences on mental health. This includes diagnosis journeys, discrimination, advocacy in medical settings etc…
    
• Decolonization of mental health research, policies and practice
  • We recently highlighted an important article on tackling colonized research practices through culturally-relevant informed consent and we will indeed continue, and expand on, this conversation. 
    
• Epistemic justice (in research and service delivery)
  • Through our content, editorial board and initiatives, we will help to ensure that marginalized communities are no longer denied opportunities to create knowledge and derive meaning from their experiences.
    
• The interactions between meritocracy and mental health
  • In educational and workplace settings, meritocracy can cause anxiety, depression and perpetuate stigma. PLOS Mental Health will shine a spotlight on this.
    
• Supporting ECRs and independent advocates who wish to write manuscripts
  • We have started a blog series on author tips and this includes a post on writing articles for Early Career Researchers and Independent Researchers. We will continue to work on similar resources in order to provide as much guidance as possible to those who may not have extensive experience writing academic papers. 
    
• Providing guidance on terminology and regional variations
  • At PLOS Mental Health, we want to strike a balance between not censoring language (especially with respect to regional differences) but, at the same time, preventing the use of any terms that may be offensive. To help with this, we will be working on some terminology guidance for authors in the near future. 

The above will be on our radars and plans are already in place to ensure that we have not just listened to the feedback of our focus group and the communities that they represent, but that we act on it. We would like to thank the focus group again for their insightful feedback and time so far and we look forward to learning more from them later in the year. As a reminder, our amazing group members are:

Image credit

PLOS/Karli Montague-Cardoso

Don’t forget, PLOS Mental Health has a dedicated ‘Lived Experience & Advocacy’ Section that we are continuing to grow. Specifically, this section aims to explore the impact that lived experiences have on our understanding and treatment of mental health conditions. Examples include lived experience-led initiatives, service delivery, peer-led service delivery, peer support, advocacy, co-production of research and de-stigmatization. You can find all published content here but some of our thought-provoking Lived Experience articles include:

• LGBTQ+ mental health
  • It’s time to transform the LGBT health research landscape in Malaysia
  • Nonverbal expressions of shame predict suicidal ideation among rurally-situated, but not urban situated, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) adults
  • Mental health in gay, lesbian and bisexual medical students
• Discrimination
  •  A Co-Produced Review of the Experiences of Black male detention under mental health legislation: Challenging discrimination in Psychiatry using the Silences Framework.
• Conflict and child mental health
  • Lebanese and Syrian refugee parents’ experiences of accessing mental health care for their children in Lebanon: Findings from a qualitative study
  • Being a Military Child in Denmark: Young people’s experiences of living with a parent with PTSD
• Chronic illness
  • Lived Experiences and Coping Strategies among Cancer Patients in the Volta Region of Ghana
• Mental Health Services
  • Emergency department care experiences among youth with mental health concerns