Exploring Experience

The Project - tinyurl.com/exploring-experience

Exploring Experience has been developed to create an accessible and manageable resource to support teaching and study in the field of mental health and distress. Six contributors with experiences of significant distress ("Experts by Experience", or EBE) were recruited through an open strategy, and were paid* to prepare the materials on this site. We have collated 35 videos of around ten minutes each, all recording self-edited responses to open questions of relevance to teaching in mental health. As well as self-directed topics, all contributors have answered the following questions:

• How would you describe in your own words your "mental health problem", or experiences of distress?
• Has anything particularly helped you or made things worse along the way?
• What has your experience of accessing and engaging with any "mental health" services been like?
• What advice would you give to a psychologist trying to help someone with your kind of experiences?

You can see more about how we recruited our contributors on our instruction to contributors page.

Why was this necessary?

The project was born from one lecturer's own experiences of teaching preparation for this subject matter. There are very many options for directing students to academic understandings of human distress, or service perspectives on provision. However, the experience of distress is a shared human experience, and it is widely recognised in mental health education that it is important for students to appreciate the humanity of lived experiences in a way which cannot be conveyed by academic literature or service-based articles and papers.

Other projects have collated EBE accounts, but they have tended to be centrally edited; this opens up concerns about who has made decisions regarding the "important" things to hear from the accounts, and risks losing the sense of authenticity.

Equally, there are many examples of EBE having produced their own accounts, published on YouTube, in blogs, and across other social media. These accounts undoubtedly hold rich material for us all to reflect on the reality of lived experience, and we would encourage everyone to explore these accounts to deepen your understanding of the human experience of distress (although we note that they should not normally be used in teaching directly without the permission of the creator). However, as a teaching resource, it can be hard to find appropriate material to address the specific points which are required in teaching, which needs to be balanced between sharing such accounts alongside the other demands rightfully expected of educators. It is also very hard to find comparable resources - one of the intentions of this project is to introduce students to the diversity and individuality of experiences, which is partially achieved by having asked the same four questions of all contributors.

As such, this project has sought to create material which maintains the authenticity of the EBE voice, whilst also keeping sufficient focus for use in teaching and study, and allowing for the specific learning about diversity. It is also free to be used by any educators, without having to seek further permission from the contributors (as would be good ethical practice for other YouTube videos).

Who should use this project?

Please note that whoever is using this material, we recommend reading our trigger warning before proceeding any further, as the videos contain detailed accounts of circumstances which could be very upsetting to view for some people. These videos could be relevant for:

• Students of psychology and other social sciences at any further education or higher education level could use this resource in independent study related to mental health experiences
• Educators in the above arenas are welcome to use the resource within their teaching materials
• Trainees and educators in any mental health profession - particularly applied psychology and psychotherapy - will find some of the material here particularly relevant
• Facilitators of awareness events might also find the videos useful

The material in this project is provided as a teaching and study resource free of charge. However, this is a limited use, and please see our reuse and licensing page for more information about appropriate uses. We also ask for your feedback on how this material has been used in your institution.

What is wrong with the project?

Like any attempt to explore human experience, this project has its strengths but also its flaws. In particular, we are very aware that there are certain limitations in the demographics of our participants. For example, all of our contributors identify themselves as White British, which is far from representative of the UK population from which they were recruited. We also have only one male contributor out of six. Finally, it is noted that four of our contributors share the fact of having been "diagnosed" with "Borderline Personality Disorder" as a primary issue (though as you will see, all have different thoughts about the process of diagnosis and this label in particular), when there are many people whose accounts would have been a valid contribution to this project who would not have had this experience.

In order to ensure that there was no sense of exploitation for our contributors, they all had experience of previously discussing their difficulties in a public forum (i.e. we did not use our fee to encourage people to do something that they wouldn't have done otherwise). However, this does mean that the accounts are skewed by being only those of people who already had the capacity to reflect and share in this manner; students and educators should consider how the accounts of people who would not feel able to share in this manner might be different.

Whilst our intention had been to create a resource which was more representative of the diversity in experience which can accompany the diversity in demographics, we were regrettably unable to achieve this in our first phase of recruitment. If we secure further funding to create more resources in the future, we will seek to address these limitations specifically within our recruitment. If YOU would like to be part of any such development, please have a look at our taking part page.

*Two contributors were staff at Nottingham Trent University, and did not receive any additional payment for this material.