Lived Experience Collaboration Platform
2 min read · Last updated 1 October 2026
Lived experience involvement in mental health research has grown substantially in recent years, but the resources available to support it have not kept pace. Researchers setting up a YPAG for the first time, lived experience coordinators working across multiple projects, and young people trying to understand what good involvement looks like all face the same problem: the knowledge exists, but it is scattered, inconsistent in quality, and hard to find. This project, funded by Wellcome and UKRI and delivered by Science Practice, McPin Foundation, and MHPSS Collaborative, is building a platform to change that.
The platform is not an attempt to standardise involvement or produce a single prescriptive model. It is an attempt to make the existing knowledge findable, to document what good practice looks like in practice, and to give researchers, coordinators, and young people the tools to make better decisions - faster.
The Platform
The Lived Experience Collaboration Platform is an online resource launching with two initial modules: child and youth mental health collaboration (covering involvement of young people aged 10–24 in mental health research) and safeguarding in lived experience collaboration (with a particular focus on people with learning and communication differences). The modules are designed to be genuinely useful to the people who will use them (researchers, lived experience coordinators, young people, and carers) rather than aspirational documents that describe best practice without supporting it.
The platform is being co-created by a working group of 29 members drawn from all of these constituencies: people with lived experience of mental health challenges from different age groups, backgrounds, and regions; mental health researchers at different career stages; lived experience coordinators; and carers and family members. Because the working group is large and geographically diverse, members rarely meet as a full group, instead working in sub-groups of five to ten people across different activities, with the structure designed to ensure that every part of the platform reflects genuine input from the people it is meant to serve.
My Involvement
I am a member of the working group, contributing as a young person with lived experience of mental health challenges and extensive experience of research involvement across multiple projects. My contributions span the full range of working group responsibilities: sharing learnings from prior involvement work to help set the context for the platform, contributing ideas to the overall format and to the content of the child and youth mental health module, reviewing early designs, and helping document the working process so that the methodology can be replicated for future modules.