Depression Detectives was a user-led citizen science project that ran between March and September 2021. It brought together people with lived experience of depression, and researchers who study it, as EQUAL partners. The aim was to get researchers listening to and working with non-scientists and put lived experience at the heart of research.
It was a public engagement activity as part of an MRC funded research project. It’s was collaboration between Edinburgh Neuroscience and public engagement practitioner Sophia Collins and her team.
Volunteers took part in online conversations with researchers studying depression, to find out what science knows about depression, and how science found that out. They were also a chance for researchers to find out what people with lived experience wanted to know, and what insights we have, from our different perspective.
Members also came up with questions that we wanted science to answer, discussed methods to do that and ran a small piece of research together with researchers.
How did it work?
People took part in Depression Detectives who had experienced depression, or who worked or volunteered with people experiencing depression. The project was organised via private Facebook groups which did not appear on members’ timelines.
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