“Some weeks I wonder why we bother. The work with the community goes slow. Everything about it feels messy. It fights you at every turn, and you go home wrung out with nothing tidy to show for it”
A researcher said that to me last month. She was worn down after a long evening session that had run over. I knew the tiredness. The challenge is real, and it is sharper still with communities long pushed to the margins, whose experiences and needs have been overlooked and erased for decades. And people ignored time and again do not hand us their trust on a plate. Why should they? Why assume this time the outcome will be any different? They have heard fine words before. ‘But it is worth it’, I said, and told her about a project I had worked on years ago.
Maya and the torn agenda
I opened the first workshop with a measure of anxiety. Our challenge was to redesign local mental health services. We had a grant, a plan and a wall of sticky notes. I explained to the attendees – a mixture of service managers, clinicians, support workers, and people with lived experience – what we were going to do.
A few moments late, Maya arrived, a little noisily, rain still on her shoulders. She was clearly annoyed. She sat down and read the agenda we had set without her. “You decided the questions already,” she said. The room went still. She was right. We had built the scaffolding and expected them to fill in the gaps. ‘This is not coproduction’, she said, ‘it’s decoration’.
My first urge was to defend the plan. The agreement we had with the funders said we should work in partnership with the community. The timeline said hurry. Instead, I tore the agenda down the middle and put the pen on the table between us. ‘Then tell us what we got wrong’, I said. She did, with clarity and passion. For an hour she, and the others in the room, took apart our neat categories. She had spent twenty years inside mental health services that filed her away as a case and never really listened. More than one clinician had looked at her as a woman of colour and decided who she was before she spoke. I realised that offering to share power, and mean it, is tough. It carries a price, and the price is our own certainty, our assumed authority, the neat text-book manoeuvrings of traditional research methods. It was a painful moment. But that afternoon, our research project became honest.
The afternoon it clicked
Weeks on, we sat with photographs. Each person had been asked to bring an image of a place that mattered to their recovery. Ed brought a picture of a launderette. The room laughed. Ed laughed too, then explained. He was six years clean of crystal meth, and the drug had once cost him his home and most of his friends. The launderette had stayed warm when nowhere else did. It was somewhere to sit, even snooze. The machines hummed, and nobody asked why he was there. Services had seldom shown him the same ease. They had fixed their ideas about him as a gay man and drug user long before they had met.
The laughter shifted into something softer. A researcher who had read forty papers on the needs of people who had no homes and frequently took drugs said that he learned something in that moment that research papers could never convey. There was deep expertise in the room and we ignored it at our peril. Our job as researchers was to make space for it, listen hard, and have the grace to be surprised by what it exposed.
What changed
A year on, the findings reached the local Mental Health Trust. People wanted services that did not interrogate them at the door. They did not want to be asked the same questions a hundred times. They wanted a place to have a cup of tea and meet others, to rest, and to be safe. They wanted clinicians that were approachable and not too busy, or too stressed, to talk to them. The service listened. It redesigned the drop in. Staff binned the sign in sheet. The kettle stayed on past five. New training taught staff to greet a person before they assessed them. None of this came from us. It came from Maya tearing up an agenda and from Ed and his launderette and the many others who cared enough about services to sit and have difficult conversations with us, and to imagine a better future.
Attendance rose and complaints fell. Over time, new tensions arose, mainly relating to the needs of communities who had not always been welcomed. Coproduction is a long-term commitment, it is clear. It cannot be a one hit wonder. But something that stayed with me came from a woman at the final session. She kept coming back, she said, because for once the research had asked her something and then sat still long enough to hear the answer.
The graft and the debt
Coproduction runs slower than other models of needs assessment and evaluation research. It hands the steering wheel to people we, as researchers, are traditionally trained to study from a distance. The method sits with communities long talked over and asks them to speak again, knowing they risk being ignored once more.
Here lies a note of caution. Coproduction is not a soft option, and it is not free. The act of asking creates a debt. Once a statutory service invites people to speak, that service becomes accountable for what it hears. A community failed before will read silence as one more betrayal. So, the responsibility for the research does not end at the presentation of findings. It begins there. Agencies that gather this knowledge take on a duty to act on it, and a failure to act can do more harm than not asking at all.
Done with care, coproduction research remains the one way to build mental health services that fit real lives. The reward is real too. In doing it, we take the slow road because the quick one doesn’t get us to where we want to be. The people we work with have waited long enough to be heard. The least we owe them is the patience to do it right, and the courage to act on what they tell us.
