The Collab Lab aims to improve the quality of care and quality of life for adults with serious mental illness (SMI). People with serious mental illness experience chronic symptoms and significant impairments in functional areas like their ability to work, go to school, have satisfying social lives and live independently. Most frequently, people with serious mental illness have schizophrenia spectrum disorders or severe mood disorders, but they may meet criteria for a range of disorders.

 

We collaborate with ‘experts by experience’ (people with lived experience of serious mental illness), and with other stakeholders (clinicians, administrators, policymakers and family) to ensure our work is helpful and impactful. Some people identify with multiple categories, including having lived experience, being a researcher, being a clinician, and being family member of a person with a mental illness. 

 

Our research is primarily conducted in usual care clinical settings and we ‘design for dissemination’ so that interventions and strategies can be easily integrated into usual care.

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We are particularly interested in developing, testing, and implementing treatment interventions and strategies that effectively promote elements of the recovery model, including:

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• Meaningful involvement of people with SMI in their own care, and more broadly, in the communities of their choosing.

• Meaningful, non-tokenistic roles for people with SMI in domains including clinical care, research, policy, and advocacy.

• Interventions that promote community connection, empowerment, hope, resilience, and engagement in personally valued activities and reduce self-stigma, psychiatric symptoms, and functional impairments.

• Strategies that increase use of trauma-informed, person-centered, and culturally humble care.

• Methods that facilitate clinical care that is evidence-based and informed by routine outcome monitoring.