Co-designing wellbeing: the commonality of needs between co-designers and mental health service users

This paper considers the potential impact of the co-design process on the wellbeing of stakeholders involved in mental health service design. The findings presented here are drawn from semi-structured interviews conducted with both co-designers of a perinatal mental health service, who previously had issues with their mental health and acted as experts by experience, and the service users who accessed the designed offer. These have subsequently been analysed using a General Inductive Analysis approach (Thomas, 2006) to understand the factors that impacted on a participant’s wellbeing in both circumstances. Our findings highlight that there are similarities between the factors that impacted on the wellbeing of the co-designers and those that impacted on the wellbeing of service users accessing a mental health service. This paper suggests ways in which the design community might learn from the mental health sector to manage, and potentially improve, co-designers’ wellbeing during the co-design process. It also suggests how the role of the designer might need to expand to explicitly consider and manage the wellbeing of co-designers during a project.