‘This is doin’ My Head in': The Ethics of Psychological Research

Psychological and mental health research is very wide-ranging in methods and ethical risk and poses interesting challenges for researchers and ethics reviewers alike. Populations of interest can range from the general population, children and young people, people experiencing mild symptoms of common mental health problems to those who experience significant mental illness or psychosocial disability. The principles of ethical research provide all these people with equal rights to participate, but blunt definitions of vulnerability create inherent barriers for some and make a nuanced approach to operationalising risk and mitigation difficult. The methods used in psychological research have done little to improve the situation and have instead made it more complicated. For example, consider asking sensitive questions about someone's experience of suicidal thoughts: A survey may get a wider range of views, but can it adequately support someone triggered by the questions? Conversely, against whom might you be discriminating if you enforce strict exclusion criteria for those at highest risk? This chapter focuses on two potentially vulnerable populations: People with lived experiences of mental illness, and children and adolescents. We offer two anonymised case studies as a springboard to investigating several tricky ethical issues that do ethics committees heads in.