This research explores how trust is understood and experienced within mental health services in Tayside. It examines the role that Participatory Design can play in strengthening relationships between practitioners and the individuals that they serve. The study is grounded in the context of the Strang Report (2020), which identified various shortcomings in Tayside’s mental health services.
The research aims to explore how trust is built and maintained from the perspective of mental health practitioners, and how Participatory Design methods support the rebuilding of trust in this context. The research also adopts a constructivist epistemology with an interpretivist phenomenological approach, positioning this study’s understanding that trust is something that can be understood through co-constructed knowledge and lived experience.
A combination of mapping, illustrating and co-design are used as the methods of this research within a Participatory Action Research (PAR) structure. The purpose of using these methods is to explore how practitioners build trust in their practice. Following a PAR structure, these methods connect with each other through iterative cycles of action and reflection.
The key findings of this study highlight five principles of relational trust: Ability, Reliability and Motivation from the Strang Report, and two additional principles that emerged through this research, Connection and Transparency. Together, these principles describe how practitioners understand trust and how they build it through their everyday work. The study also produces a series of design opportunities that use these findings to help practitioners reflect on their own practice and identify ways to build trust within mental health services in Tayside.