More than five years after the murder of George Floyd forced institutions to confront racial injustice, it is worth asking what has actually changed. As an associate professor of forensic psychology, I’ve been considering this question in relation to research – in particular, how universities produce knowledge about the communities that are affected by racial disparities in the UK.

Racially minoritised communities continue to experience consistently poorer mental health outcomes. They are more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act, less likely to access talking therapies early, and more likely to disengage from services that do not feel safe or culturally responsive.

And while universities across the UK have made visible efforts to decolonise knowledge production, diversify research samples and recruit more researchers from minoritised backgrounds, many of the core questions that shape psychological research remain largely unchanged.

Who defines what counts as distress? Is anger framed as pathology rather than a response to racism? Who decides which communities are “hard to reach”? Who determines what meaningful impact looks like? And what importance do we place on the lived experience of researchers?

Whose reality is believed?

Lived experience of a mental health issue can be devalued in favour of clinical, academic and professional knowledge, so that when people describe their distress, these accounts tend to be reframed through clinical interpretation rather than recognised as valid experiences........

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