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This paper aims to evaluate the quality of co-production between lived experience practitioners (LXPs) and professionals in an interactive National Health Service webinar series aimed at supporting people who were diagnosed or identified with borderline personality disorder.

Transcripts from the webinars were subjected to mixed-method examination combining Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) and content analysis (CA).

FDA identified nine discursive objects: diagnosis beyond its medical context, diagnosis as a total explanation, being the other, universality, compassion, hope, faking it, mentalisation and co-production. CA demonstrated those nine discursive objects each corresponded with equalised airtime appropriated by professionals and lived experience practitioners.

The sample was limited and if applied to other mental health settings might reveal different findings. More needs to be understood about the attitudes of professionals and LXPs that support discourse sharing. Although this study has offered evidence of the quality of co-production, it can say very little about whether the co-productive approach offers superior outcomes to other forms of treatment.

Further research could employ FDA and CA to further explore how co-production is being enacted in other situations, with different models, where comparable interventions are delivered. Future research could compare outcomes between co-productive and professional-only interventions.

This study examined naturalistic practice to build new theory in an under-researched area for a substantial mental health population.

This article describes ResearchNet, a project based within the Oxleas Foundation NHS Trust that involves service users and carers in research as a means of supporting recovery. A key element of their approach to service user and carer research is to combine volunteering and network building.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a gap in knowledge about the interaction between mentalizing skills and social inclusion activity immediate after completing an intensive mentalization-based treatment (MBT) program.

Lived experience was explored through the use of timelines, repeated cycles of audio-recorded focus groups and inductive thematic analysis.

Destructive cycles between self-hatred and social-exclusion were first disrupted by MBT because people felt understood. Being understood reduced self-hatred which was an essential precursor for attempting new forms of mentalizing in social interactions. This process was challenging but continued as a virtuous cycle after treatment finished.

The sample was limited because at three, it was small. However, the study was co-produced between professional and service users at all stages. Lived experience was carefully explored in depth and triangulated between three people. The authors acknowledge too that they have reflected on experience within only one to three years after MBT finished. Future studies might usefully replicate the methodology to trace experience up to the eight year follow up point undertaken by Bateman and Fonagy (2008).

There is a great sense of loss for service users when therapy ends and that ending needs to be managed on both sides. Service users start to acquire powerful new skills and thought processes at the end of therapy. While this may not be overwhelming, they will not be used to them and so it helps when therapists help service users think about their plans and ideas for things they want to do or changes they might make in their lives.

While supporting quantitative data about the outcome of therapy, this study offers the type of qualitative detail about how the psychological and social interact post-therapy, which can inform the successful management of those processes by those involved.

This Research Watch aims to summarise two recent and very different research publications on art therapy and comments on their ability to shed light on the usefulness of art therapy to address mental distress and enhance social inclusion.

The author discusses a recent edition of a UK art therapy journal in which research papers focus on art therapy with people who have been given a diagnosis of personality disorder. The main methodologies are qualitative describing participants’ and/or therapists’ experiences and the role of art therapy in addressing serious mental distress. The second publication is a recent report of a large randomised controlled trial of art therapy for people given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The author assesses the value of both publications in informing us about the usefulness of art therapy in addressing mental distress and enhancing social inclusion.

In the author's view, neither publication establishes definitively how or whether art therapy might address serious mental distress, whether labelled personality disorder or schizophrenia. However, the qualitative articles provide insight into possible helpful (and less helpful) aspects of therapy. The randomised trial should have been able to establish general principles about the effectiveness of art therapy for a specific group of people in specified contexts, but instead exemplifies many problems inherent in the pervasive research culture of putting numbers onto complex human interactions and calculating their value for money, sometimes at the expense of really understanding what is going on.

The author draws upon these two very different examples of research to reflect a current dilemma in UK art therapy research, and tentatively looks at possible ways forward.

A quarterly reflection on recent research into mental health and social inclusion issues.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the surrounding attitudes, culture and workplace environment in which Oxleas NHS Foundation trust developed a network for staff with lived experience of mental ill health.

Sarah Paynter completed an interview talking about her experiences with a peer, which was recorded, then the authors picked out relevant themes from this which are grounded in lived experience. The paper examines the theme of lived experience in the workplace in more depth, from a personal perspective (Sarah) and from an organisational perspective (Christine).

There is a lack of dialogue about staff lived experience of mental ill health within the workplace. There are compelling reasons from both the perspective of the organisation and staff with lived experience for setting up a lived experience staff network. The authors note that increased dialogue and visibility has added value on both sides.

This is a relatively new initiative in the NHS, and particularly in mental health trusts. The authors speak from their experiences in Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. This is of value to organisations looking to start dialogue and therefore improve the experiences of staff and the quality of the organisation.

The world of work is constantly evolving such that the Workforce in the previous era was driven by the need for stability and is now driven by the desire for creative disruption. While firms must respond to the challenges and dynamics continuously, employees must be ready for any upcoming change to progress despite the turbulence and attain a competitive position. This paper's focal theme is Workforce agility – the ability of employees to respond to and make the most out of changes. Studies on the personal factors affected by changes, in turn, influencing Workforce agility have been scarce. The authors propose a conceptual model with propositions to address this gap. Additionally, the authors propose an employee-centric experiential training practice to foster agility.

The authors have employed conceptual description methodology to build propositions about the personal factors influencing Workforce agility and an arts-based intervention to enhance it.

Intermodal arts-based intervention (IABI) can influence employees' epistemic curiosity, which aids with managing ruminative thoughts, thus enhancing Workforce agility, while dispositional joy moderates this relationship.

The proposed “Intermodal Arts-Based Intervention (IABI)” can help firms move from a traditional training-based approach to an experiential one to foster their Workforce's agile capacities. Considerations for its implementation are explained.

This study is one of the first attempts to integrate multiple art forms as a change management practice. The conceptualized model also brings out the adaptive and maladaptive aspects of epistemic curiosity and rumination and the role of joy in promoting agile behaviors.