(Survey open until 28th February 2025)
Article by Lauren Hempseed
Mental health practitioners with lived experience of self-injury face stigma in both professional and personal contexts. This is the motivation behind our current research which seeks to understand experiences of such practitioners in navigating disclosure of their self-injury practices. The research is being led by Fiona Stirling who works as a counselling lecturer at Abertay University. Lauren Hempseed, a research assistant, is an undergraduate student at Abertay University, studying Psychology and Counselling. Both Fiona and I have lived / living experiences with self-injury and fully believe that lived experience can enhance connection and provide valuable pool of knowledge for mental health practitioners to tap into to help those in need. We hope through this project to raise awareness around mental health practitioners who battle with their own mental health, to establish the constraints placed on them around their disclosure / non-disclosure practices and inspire future research within this area to ultimately encourage change.
We are sharing our participant callout here as our hopes for this project firmly align with the key ambition of in2gr8mentalhealth. We believe in working towards a world where mental health practitioners are seen and accepted as human beings who can suffer from mental health difficulties while also being exceptionally capable. Our main aim is to help destigmatise and break down barriers that still stand firmly against mental health practitioners with lived and living experience with self-injury.
We would like to invite all mental health practitioners with lived/living experience with/of self-injury which has left visible scars to take part in our fully anonymised questionnaire. Follow the link below for a detailed explanation of the study, along with 2 starter questions to confirm individuals meet the necessary requirements to take part in the study. The full questionnaire will then follow on from this.
If you are not eligible to take part but would like to be kept up to date with the progression of our research, please email Lauren at 2205579@uad.ac.uk. If you provide your details, we will keep you up to date with any research developments and links to the published findings. Should you have any questions about the study please include these in your email and we will be happy to answer these the best we can, and together hopefully we can fight back against the crushing weight of stigma.
Warmest Regards,
Fiona Stirling & Lauren Hempseed
in2gr8mentalhealth CIC can provide peer consultation to researchers in the mental health field who are undertaking 'insider research' into mental health difficulties, where they also have lived/ing experience of mental health difficulties themselves.
The benefits of peer consultation:
It can be particularly useful during setting the stance at the beginning of research, during question making and analysis in qualitative work, and considering mentoring as a part of ongoing reflective diaries.
It can support the researcher in considering their own position to their lived experience through the lifetime of the study.
It helps the researcher notice any influences from lived passion and/or pain on the research, and holds that tenderly.
It values and embraces the lived experience of the researcher as an inherent part of what is brought to the research motivation, and supports the researcher to discern knowledge in the service of participants during the study.
in2gr8 can support the dissemination of information for recruitment, and of study results.
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