What If We Failed?

A note: This piece is a collection of thoughts and conversations that have emerged from within the Our LENS Matters research team, several of whom also navigate this work from a place of personal experience with mental health challenges. It is distilled into a reflection on what failure might mean for a project like this. The premortem was shaped by conversations with colleagues about possible modes of failure, so I use 'I' for my perspective and 'we' for the shared thinking that informed it.

I am a South African, Coloured (a category imposed on mixed and indigenous people by the apartheid state) woman, cisgendered, heterosexual, and living with a mental health condition. I grew up on the Cape Flats, a place the apartheid regime deliberately constructed to contain people of colour in poverty and structural violence. Growing up meant navigating the daily reality of that violence: scarcity of basic needs, trauma, and the particular kind of endurance that comes from not knowing whether things will be different. I no longer live in those conditions, and I grapple with the complicated privilege of having made it ‘out’, knowing that the history of that place continues to shape how I think, what I fear, and why I do this work.

As a researcher with lived experience of mental health challenges, I sit both inside and outside the phenomenon this project examines. I have worked and studied within universities long enough to understand the protections that institutional belonging can offer, and to know what it means to no longer hold them. I now work outside those structures, in an organisation I'm working to co-create as a different kind of space for research and learning, which shapes both what I can say and how safely I can say it. That privilege extends to this piece: I have the safety of a work community that supports this writing, and the access to platforms that allow it to be shared widely. I do not claim neutrality. What I can do is speak as one voice among many who have not found traditional learning institutions to be safe places, and contribute, in whatever way this piece allows, to transforming how mental health is understood and held in academic spaces.

I write from that place, and I invite you to engage with it knowing who is speaking.

A premortem¹ is an exercise in productive pessimism. Before a project begins or while it is still taking shape, you imagine that it has already failed. Not that it stumbled, or fell short of its targets, but that it failed in ways that feel significant. Then you ask: how did that happen?

Taking that question seriously, before failure has actually happened, is a way of looking directly at a project's fragilities, naming what we are afraid of, before those fears quietly shape what we do without us realising it.

Our LENS Matters is a three-year project that brings together a Learning Collective of mental health researchers and practitioners in South Africa who have their own lived experience of mental health challenges, and who navigate the question of whether, when, and how to bring that experience into their work. The project examines how researchers with lived experience navigate research environments, what it costs, and what it might look like if those environments were transformed. It is built on the conviction that lived experience is an essential form of expertise that can be held alongside other forms of research expertise. It holds that vulnerability, when held carefully, can be methodological, and that the hard work of becoming a researcher and the hard work of living with mental distress are not separate stories. In practice, this means that being honest about what you carry into the work, rather than pretending to stand outside it, can shape the questions you ask, what you notice, and how honestly you report what you find. A centrepiece of the project is an in-person storytelling workshop, where collective members explore what it has meant to navigate research environments while living with mental health challenges. From there, we move into a series of collaborative methods labs: structured sessions where the collective critically engages with participatory and decolonial approaches to research design, interrogating existing literature and testing how these methodologies might apply to their own work. Building on that collective learning, members then design and implement small learning projects, each one an attempt to explore how lived experience can be more meaningfully integrated into a specific research context. Through all of this, the project aims to build a caring and inclusive community of researchers with lived experience who can support one another and collectively examine what it would take to transform the conditions in which they work.

So what would it look like if a project like this failed? What follows is our attempt to answer it.

What if no one shows up?

The most basic failure is the one that happens before the project properly begins. Recruitment for the Learning Collective asks researchers to identify themselves as people with lived experience of mental health challenges, to join a group of strangers, and to commit to a process of storytelling and reflection that will ask them to go to difficult places. For many researchers, that ask will simply be too great.

The professional risks of being identified, even within a confidential research context, may outweigh any sense of what the project could offer. During a Community of Practice session with other organisations funded under the same scheme, following our team's presentation on our focus on researchers with lived experience, someone sent a private message to one of our team members rather than speak in the group. They were struggling with whether and how to disclose their own lived experience in their research. Even in a space designed to hold these conversations, they were afraid of what disclosure might cost them professionally. If that is the experience in a space populated by people who work on lived experience, it is not hard to understand why a researcher might look at what LENS is asking and decide the risk is not worth it.

The literature on lived experience in mental health research consistently documents these professional risks. Researchers who speak openly about their own mental health challenges face real consequences in terms of credibility, career progression, and collegial relationships.² These risks are compounded in contexts like South Africa, where mental health stigma remains acute and research environments can be deeply hierarchical. We may never know how many people considered participating and decided against it, or what that self-selection means for whose voices and experiences end up represented in the work. And for those who do join, there is a related question: whether they feel safe enough to show up fully, or whether the conditions that make disclosure risky in their institutions follow them into this space too, leading them to continue masking rather than being present in the way the work requires.

What if we aren’t ready for what this asks of us?

A phrase has kept coming up in our team conversations: the work to do the work is the learning. What we mean is that before we can ask co-researchers to tell their stories, to sit with the tensions in their dual identities, to reflect on what it has cost them to be both a researcher and a person living with mental health challenges, we have to be willing to do the same. We are not neutral facilitators. We are also autoethnographers, participant observers, people with our own histories inside the very systems we are trying to study.

Several members of our team have their own lived experience of mental health challenges. The emotional labour this project demands is not abstract for us. We are being asked to hold space for experiences that, in some cases, mirror our own. And there is a risk that we underestimate what that requires. If the team does not do its own internal work, the reflexive and uncomfortable kind, before asking co-researchers to do theirs, the project will show it. We cannot ask people to go somewhere we have not been willing to go ourselves.

There is also a risk that some team members find the internal work too hard and choose, consciously or not, to step back from it. That is understandable. It is also a failure mode, because the work requires the team to be present in a way that cannot be faked.

The failure mode that follows is not a team that stopped caring. It is a team so deeply entangled in the very experiences we are trying to hold space for that we can no longer hold that space with enough clarity and steadiness to be useful to others. Facilitation requires a kind of dual consciousness: being present enough to understand, and separate enough to guide. When the facilitators are also, in some sense, participating in the process, that balance becomes hard to maintain. The dual role of participant-observer raises practical, conceptual, and epistemological questions we have to actively think through: what it means to generate knowledge from inside an experience rather than from the outside looking in, and how to hold methodological rigour while remaining open to what the process surfaces.

There is a set of questions one of our team members raised that we think belongs here: what if our own ways of organising this project reproduce some of the conditions we hope to change? What if the hierarchies, the pace, the power dynamics inside the team mirror the very structures we are trying to examine? While supported through a scheme that directly intends to enable innovation in lived experience research, the structure is a commissioned project with a bounded timeline, fixed funding, and deliverables to achieve.

We have taken one concrete step thus far to creating space for us to explore these questions: establishing a reading group where the team engages with critical literature and sits with some of the harder conceptual and ethical questions the project raises. It is not sufficient on its own. If the team does not build genuine structures of rest and mutual care into the project, not as add-ons but as core infrastructure, the weight will accumulate in ways that eventually show in the work.

What if the space does more harm than good?

Even if people come, the project can still fail them. Storytelling about mental health challenges, in a group of relative strangers, can surface distress that co-researchers did not anticipate. The conditions that make the workshop and other collective spaces generative, the invitation to go deep, to verbalise what has been costly, to speak what has usually been kept private, are the same conditions that can tip into overwhelm. A project designed to create safety can, if it gets this wrong, cause real harm. We have tried to build in clinical support, careful pacing, and clear exit points, but we cannot fully predict what the work will surface for any individual.

The subtler failure is a space that feels open but is not quite open or safe enough. Where people are present but guarded. Where the storytelling stays at the surface because going deeper feels too risky, and where co-researchers learn to perform vulnerability rather than practice it. We keep returning to a difficult question: in creating spaces where co-researchers are invited to be open about their lived experience, are we asking them to model a kind of disclosure that their own institutions have not yet made safe?

There is a related risk. Even if individuals feel safe enough to share, the Learning Collective may never fully cohere as a collective. People arrive with their own stories, their own institutional contexts, their own reasons for being here, and there is no guarantee that those individual experiences accumulate into something shared. A group of people who have each spoken honestly is not the same as a community that has built a collective understanding.

Who are we actually building this for?

Researchers with lived experience of mental health challenges carry more institutional power than many people with lived experience will ever hold. They have made it inside the institution in some form, which means they have access, credibility, and a platform, however precarious. The project centres them explicitly.

Many people with lived experience of mental health challenges have never had access to academic spaces and never will, regardless of what LENS produces. Centring researchers with lived experience is not the same as centring lived experience communities more broadly. There is a privilege embedded in being an academic researcher at all, even a researcher who struggles.

The failure mode here is a kind of scope creep in reverse: the project, by doing its specific work well, starts to feel like it is doing more than it can. Where researchers with lived experience quietly becomes a stand-in for all lived experience. Where inclusion within research culture gets mistaken for justice beyond it. And there is a harder question still: what lived experience perspectives are missing not just from academia, but from the research questions we are even capable of asking? The people whose mental health challenges have kept them furthest from research institutions may have the most to contribute to how we understand those challenges. This project cannot reach them.

What if nothing changes?

Lived experience is increasingly welcomed in mental health research. Funders want it, institutions gesture toward it and conferences make space for it. The lived experience that tends to get welcomed is the kind that affirms existing systems: here is my story, and here is how it made me a better researcher. Lived experience that goes further, that questions what gets researched and why, that challenges who holds authority in research spaces, that says the structure itself is part of the problem, tends to become inconvenient.

The failure mode we are most afraid of is the one that would be hardest to see clearly. The project produces outputs, the Learning Collective convenes, co-researchers develop learning projects, and findings are published. Yet, none of it changes what it costs a researcher to be honest about their mental health in a South African university or elsewhere. None of it shifts the stigma that makes disclosure feel professionally dangerous, the institutional cultures that extract value from lived experience while failing to support the people who carry it, or the research environments where a researcher can feel entirely alone in navigating the intersection of their work and their mental health.

We are still figuring out how to hold a project that aims to inform change in South African research institutions while being funded by and accountable to an international funder with its own interests and expectations. That tension does not resolve. It has to be actively managed, again and again, as the project unfolds. And we have to keep asking whether our own ways of organising this work reproduce some of the conditions we are trying to change.

What if lived experience makes science worse, not better?

The argument for integrating lived experience into research is that it produces richer, more contextually grounded, more empathic science. That researchers who carry lived experience understand things from the inside that others cannot access from without. We believe this and we also have to sit with the possibility that it is not always true.

The intimacy that lived experience can produce may sometimes close off as much as it opens up. A researcher-facilitator may assume they understand a co-researchers’ experience because it echoes their own, without interrogating that assumption. Claiming connection is not the same as having it. And science that doesn't examine its own subjectivity, whatever the source of that subjectivity, is not more rigorous for having lived experience behind it.

Research culture has long used the myth of objectivity to exclude experiential knowledge. We do not want to reinstate that myth. But we also cannot assume that subjectivity, simply by being present, improves the work. The challenge of integrating lived experience into research in ways that are rigorous, critical, and honest is harder than either defending objectivity or celebrating what subjectivity allows for. If the project cannot model what that looks like, and cannot produce science that is better for having done it, then it will have done something important but not what it set out to do.

Why we are writing this down

A premortem only works if it changes something. If it remains a document, thoughtful and well-intentioned but filed somewhere, it is not a premortem. It is a record of fears that were never acted on.

So this is also a commitment. To build team care into the structure of the project, not just the spirit of it. To take seriously the possibility that our spaces are not as safe as we hope, and to keep asking our co-researchers how they actually feel rather than assuming. To hold institutional critique even when it becomes uncomfortable. To be honest about what this project is for, and what it cannot do.

We started this project because we believe that lived experience is not a liability but a powerful lens through which to view, understand, and ultimately improve mental health science. We still believe that. What writing this premortem has clarified is that belief is the part that costs us nothing and protects no one. The question is whether we can build a project that is structurally capable of living up to it.

I am writing this because I know what it costs when these things go wrong. Not in the abstract. I have been the researcher whose diagnosis closed doors that should have stayed open. I have sat in institutions that benefited from my lived experience insight while remaining unable to hold my distress. I have felt what it is to compartmentalise, to leave the part of yourself that most shapes your work outside the door, because bringing it in felt too risky.

I am also someone who believes that this can change. That the dual identity of researcher and person with lived experience is not a liability. That it is a form of expertise. That the hard work of becoming a researcher and the hard work of living with mental distress are not separate stories, and that treating them as separate has cost mental health science something it cannot easily name or measure.

This project is our attempt to change that. This premortem is one attempt to hold that, with our eyes open to what could go wrong.

Notes

1. The premortem technique was developed by cognitive psychologist Gary Klein and later popularised by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). It draws on research into prospective hindsight, the finding that imagining a failure as already having occurred helps identify risks more effectively than forward-looking prediction. ↩
2. Chatterjee, U. R., Schumer, M. C., Effinger, D. P., Jones, N., Vest, N. A., Cahill, M. E., Staglin, B. K., & Nestler, E. J. (2025). Breaking barriers: centering researchers with lived experience in psychiatric neuroscience. NPP - digital psychiatry and neuroscience, 3, 26. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44277-025-00048-7
   Faulkner, A., & Thompson, R. (2021): Uncovering the emotional labour of involvement and co-production in mental health research, Disability & Society, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2021.1930519
   Gergel T. (2026). Lived experience research: recognition of dual expertise. The lancet. Psychiatry, S2215-0366(26)00057-X. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(26)00057-X ↩