Citizen Science To Achieve Coproduction at Scale (C-STACS)
The C-STACS study explored the application of a citizen science approach to mental health research. It was funded by UKRI until 2025. It was a collaboration with the NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre.
Who was involved?
From 2021 to 2024 the C-STACS Research Fellow was Olamide Todowede, and in 2025 it was Joy Llewellyn-Beardsley. The study was led by multidisciplinary researchers at the University of Nottingham (Doreen Boyd, Mike Slade (PI), Stuart Moran, Stefan Rennick-Egglestone). The study was co-led with the Centre for Mental Health, ImROC, KCL Service User Research Enterprise (SURE), McPin Foundation, Mental Elf, National Survivor User Network (NSUN), NHS Confederation, Nottingham BRC Mental Health and Technology Involvement Team, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Social Spider community interest company and Taraki.
Publications
Our C-STACS work will always be published open access (i.e. there will always be a freely-accessible public version of every paper that we publish) and open data (i.e. all data we collect will be available in the public domain).
We described the transformative potential for mental health of citizen science here, and co-produced a preliminary model for how citizen science can create change here.
We published a systematic review developing best practice guidelines for using citizen science in mental health here, as defined in a prospectively-registered protocol here. A summary of our review findings has been published by The Mental Elf here. We then conducted a 10-country Delphi consultation to evaluate consensus about characteristics of mental health citizen science here.
Our first citizen science project investigated the self-management strategies used by people living with mental health problems. It is reported here.