Taking lived experience involvement in mental health research forward: developing a Mental Health Treatment Acceptability Measure (MHTA).

I aim to establish a national centre of excellence in lived experience methods in mental health, initially in the form of a new research group.

To do this, I will conduct a research study to gain the research leadership experience and training needed to become a group leader. The study will be an exemplar of the type of work the group will undertake. The first topic to be addressed will be treatment acceptability. Mental health research usually focuses on how well a treatment works on reducing clinical symptoms – efficacy.

However, many patients do not find commonly used treatments to be acceptable. For example: ‘49% of major psychiatric disorder patients were non-adherent to their psychotropic medication’ (19). There is a gap between research and the views of patients.

I propose addressing this by measuring treatment ‘acceptability’ which includes a range of factors such as overall ‘burden’, attitudes towards treatment, etc. Very few treatment acceptability measures exist for mental health. None have had any stated involvement of people with mental health problems.

My proposal is to develop a treatment acceptability measure tailored for common mental health treatment types. By measuring acceptability, we can make treatments better and more accessible for everyone.