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December 12, 2024
Our involvement with the UCL Mental Health Science PhD students began in October 2020. This distinctive PhD course, hosted at the UCL Institute of Mental Health has run from 2020 to 2024, welcoming six students annually. Wellcome Trust has generously supports this PhD programme, the first of its kind in the UK, with a funding of £5 million. The PhD is an exciting opportunity for students to train in a wide range of the latest methods and techniques in the field of mental health research.
Co-Production Collective have been working with each cohort of students since October 2020 facilitating a series of sessions designed to provide insight into the benefits of involving people with lived and living experience into research projects. Whilst at the same time offering practical guidance on the implementation of co-production methodologies.
Topics covered in these sessions include:
This year, we are working together with our fourth cohort of students on the programme and are asking for your support with their PhD projects.
To support their PhD projects, the students are looking to involve people with lived or living experience of mental health challenges to join their thesis committee. The committees are made up of researchers, mental health practitioners, and people with lived experience (including family members and or carers of people with lived experience), who will support the student and their supervisor throughout the research project, continuing for three years. Committee members work with the students, assisting them by reading and reviewing their written reports, advising on their oral presentations, and offering constructive feedback and support on their projects. The committees meet between six to ten times during the project timeline, and their contributions, including their approved meeting reports, are recorded in the student's online Research Log. As a lived experience advisor, you will not be required to share specific anecdotes related to your lived experience during the committee meetings.
There is payment available for each role, which is £25 per hour, and this will typically include up to one hour of preparation time for each of the meetings*. You do not have to claim these payments should you wish not to. The deadline for expressing interest in any of these roles is 17:00 (UK time ) on Thursday 2 January 2025.
Keep on reading to meet the fourth cohort of Mental Health Science PhD students and learn more about their projects and how you can get involved!
Thanks to all the members of our community and beyond who have supported the students over the last three years and thanks in advance for your support with this, this year.
Ritika is a PhD student at the Division of Psychology. She is interested in better understanding how childhood adversity might influence our relationships and how these in turn may affect our mental health. She hopes that this can help us learn more about what could help to prevent mental health problems emerging in some individuals and help promote resilient outcomes for those impacted by adversity and trauma.
She is looking to recruit 2-3 people aged 18-25 who have lived experience of:
Read more about this opportunity including how Ritika is defining trauma in the context of this project.
Oliwia is a PhD student at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She is interested in in the relationship between the brain and the body (particularly the heart) and how gaining a better understanding of this may help us treat mental health conditions better. Her PhD will investigate how heart signals influence cognitive and emotional processing in schizophrenia, exploring the potential bodily basis of symptoms. Ultimately, she hopes this work will lay the groundwork for treatments that harness the intimate interplay between the brain and body to improve outcomes for individuals with schizophrenia.
She is looking to recruit 2 people with lived experience (aged 18 and over) or carers of people who experienced psychosis, schizophrenia or hallucinations to be part of designing her research.
Read more about this opportunity.
Jasmine is a PhD student at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies. Her research looks at how young people’s social and community circumstances affect their mental health, especially in parts of the world where research has been limited or overlooked. She is particularly interested in:
She is looking to recruit up to 3 people with aged 18-25 lived experience to join her Thesis Committee and advise on this research project. She is looking to involve people who:
Read more about this opportunity.
Annabelle is a PhD student on the UCL Wellcome PhD Programme in Mental Health Science. She is interested in how social factors influence mental health, and how we can develop interventions that address these contexts. Her PhD explores loneliness and social relationships in people experiencing mental health difficulties, with the goal of developing strategies to enhance social recovery.
She is looking to recruit up to two people with lived experience who are interested in collaborating with her on this project. She is seeking people with personal experience of all of the following:
Read more about this opportunity.
Alex is a PhD student at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, UCL researching mental health. He aims to explore the relationship between chronic pain and mental health outcomes. Through three interconnected projects, he hopes to develop new treatments for chronic pain and mental health conditions by gaining a better understanding of their shared biological risk factors.
He is looking to recruit two people who are over 16 years old and have previously been diagnosed with either a mental health condition, with chronic pain of any type, or with a condition involving hereditary painlessness. He is happy to consider people who experience severe recurrent headaches or migraine.
Read more about this opportunity.
Jehanita is a PhD student at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. She is interested in the relationship between physical and mental health, in particular how inflammation is involved in depression. Her research aims to better understand how targeting inflammation – which can be linked to symptoms like fatigue, changes in appetite and loss of energy – could improve treatments for depression.
She is looking to recruit two people aged over 18 with lived experience of depression, and optionally, who have an inflammatory condition (such as rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, endometriosis or any autoimmune disease) that preceded their depression.
Read more about this opportunity.
If you would like to know more about Co-Production Collective, have any questions about the PhD projects, or have trouble accessing the documents, please get in touch with us.
* This rate is different to that of the updated Co-Production Collective Payment Policy 2024, as it is the rate that was applied for when funding application budgets were submitted.
Photo credit: Canva
Interested in finding out more or exploring how we could work together?
Co-Produce with us