Who Sees Themselves in the Future of Mental Health Research?

On 24 September, the four networks of the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation will come together for Emergent Ecosystems: Mental Health Implementation and Translation Futures.

The event builds on work that began in 2025, when participants explored what meaningful change is needed in mental health research, what networks can do to support that change, and what a flourishing mental health research ecosystem might look like.

This time, the task is to draw those ideas together.

I’ll be participating as a Co-Lead within the ALIVE Lived-Experience Research Collective, co-hosting the event and facilitating the collaborative activity focused on the Mental Health Research Futures Statement.

There is one question I keep returning to:

Who needs to see themselves in this Statement, and what would help them recognise themselves in it?

That question matters beyond one Statement.

A document can contain the right values and still leave some people unable to locate themselves within what it describes. A consultation can include people with lived and living experience and still leave uncertainty about whether their knowledge affected the eventual decision. Research can be described as collaborative while the points at which priorities, methods, implementation and translation are decided remain largely unchanged.

For me, this is where lived experience leadership becomes different from lived experience participation.

I want to understand how people's contributions reach the decisions that shape the research.

Can it shape the question being asked?

Can it alter how evidence is interpreted?

Can it affect what gets implemented?

Can people see what happened to their contribution?

Can people who were not in the room still recognise something of their lives and communities in what emerges?

That last question matters particularly when we think about cultural and linguistic diversity, carers, families and kin, and communities whose experiences do not always fit comfortably within dominant ways of describing mental health.

Representation alone cannot solve that. No individual can stand in for an entire community.

What research structures can do is create more than one point at which different knowledge can enter, be taken seriously, challenge assumptions and influence what happens next.

That is an organisational question as much as a research one.

For an organisation, that means tracing a contribution through the work: how it affected a decision, how it was used and what contributors were told.

That is why implementation and translation matter.

If lived experience knowledge influences the beginning of a project but disappears as research moves towards delivery, policy, publication or practice, participation at the front end has not solved the structural problem.

The Emergent Ecosystems event is an opportunity to keep working on that question collectively rather than assuming we already have the answer.

As we develop the Statement, I would ask:

Who needs to recognise themselves in this, and what would have to be true for them to do so?

Sometimes that question confirms what is already there. Sometimes it shows us what still needs attention. Both are useful.

Emergent Ecosystems: Mental Health Implementation and Translation Futures is being held by the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation on 24 September 2026.

Event information and registration: https://alivenetwork.com.au/emergent-ecosystems-mental-health-implementation-and-translation-futures/