Lived, loved, laboured, and learned: experience in youth mental health research

Importance is increasingly being placed on including people with lived experience of mental illness1 throughout the youth mental health research process.2, 3 This inclusion is a laudable development that improves the quality of research and the relationship between research and the lives of people with mental illness,4 while increasing the reach of research translation. However, one problem that can potentially arise in including young people with lived experience in youth mental health research is that this inclusion becomes tokenistic. This problem can occur for a range of reasons, such as inclusion not being given enough time or resources,5 insufficient clarity about how meaningfully to incorporate lived experience into research, and the inclusion not being sufficiently valued.