Supported Reporting of First Person Accounts: Assisting People Who Have Mental Health Challenges in Writing and Publishing Reports About Their Lived Experience

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Knowing the lived experience of people who have mental health challenges is considered instructive and hence potentially helpful for other people who have mental health challenges1 and for other stakeholders, such as their significant others2 and mental health care providers.3 Publishing such lived experience in journals that are read by psychiatrists and other mental health care providers, policy makers, clinical researchers, and nonclinician scientists (who do schizophrenia research but are not commonly exposed to individuals who experience schizophrenia) as well as by people who have mental health challenges and their significant others, may be an important way to promote learning from, and empathy with, people who have mental health challenges. Such publication comes in various forms, of which the most well known of late is the first person account, which is a relatively brief report, usually focused on one or a few aspects of the lived experience of a person who has one or more mental health challenges or less commonly of a significant other of such a person. By definition, the experts on lived experience of people who have mental health challenges are people with mental health challenges. They are content experts but not usually experts on how to write and publish first person accounts. Informed suggestions for people who have mental health challenges on how to write and publish first person accounts may assist them in writing and publishing their first person account, yet no such suggestions have been published to date. The objective of this article is to provide suggestions for people who have mental health challenges on how to report, ie, write and publish, first person accounts. These suggestions are based on our collective and cumulative experience of writing and publishing such first person accounts and of assisting in this process, ie, of collaborating in supported reporting of first person accounts of people who have mental health challenges.4,5 Our informed suggestions will be separately titled and elaborated on below, in an order following the order of steps of writing and publishing such first person accounts (although this order is somewhat flexible and may be circular rather than linear, depending on need for revision and resubmission of the report of the first person account).