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Community engagement: a starter pack for scientists

Karen Fortuna worked alongside people with lived experiences of psychiatric conditions to develop technologies to help improve their mental and physical health.
  1. Karen L. Fortuna

    1. Karen L. Fortuna is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

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Federal agencies in the United States spend millions of dollars each year developing programmes to help people address mental- and physical-health issues. However, only a few such initiatives are actually used in the real world. Their uptake might be limited because many scientists don’t include people with mental-health conditions as equal partners with shared decision-making authority during programme development and implementation. Co-producing interventions with community members who have first-hand experience of mental-health issues might help to stop programme manuals from collecting dust on bookshelves — and to get them put into practice.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03229-5

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged. You can get in touch with the editor at naturecareerseditor@nature.com.

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 08 November 2019: An earlier version of the caption for the second image in this story implied that all the people pictured were involved in building PeerTECH.

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