Keeping the Agenda Current: Evolution of Australian Lived Experience Mental Health Research Priorities

The value of including consumers’ and carers’ views at the early stages of study design is increasingly being recognised as essential to improving the relevance and quality of research. One method of achieving this is by actively seeking and regularly updating consumer and carer priorities for mental health research. The current study presents priorities for mental health research collected from two virtual World Cafés with consumers and carers (n = 4, n = 7) held in 2021. Over 200 priorities were identified (13 themes, 64 subthemes), which were then compared with two combined data collection activities from 2013 (face-to-face forum; n = 25), and 2017 (online survey; n = 70). There appears to be some evolution in consumer and carer priorities over time. A key difference was that in the previous studies, mental health service issues were at the individual service delivery level, whereas in the current study, a broader focus was on mental health systems of care and issues around service funding, accessibility, and equity of access. It is possible these changes may also have resulted from key differences between the studies, including the methods, setting, and participants. Overall, similar to our previous studies no clear priorities were identified; however, a significant number of important research topics were identified by consumers and carers, providing a rich agenda from which to improve the management of mental health.