Beyond the story: how we turned digital lived experience into a tool
- Marina Chrisikopoulou
- Jul 15
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
At The Human Aspect, we are often described as an organisation that records lived experiences. That description is accurate, but it is also incomplete.
Marina Chrisikopoulou
Head of Research
Istvan Daniel Barkoczi
Psychology Team Coordinator
Andrea Bujor
Social Media Coordinator
Seven years ago, we recognised the need to do more with our library of lived experience videos. Step by step, we developed a methodology for transforming lived experience video into something the mental health field can use as a tool, develop further and build on.
This post is an invitation to researchers, academics, and practitioners who are keen to understand our methodology and explore how we might develop it further together.
The problem we set out to solve
Lived experience has been recognised as valuable in mental health services and research. But valuable is different from usable.
Issues of confidentiality, safety of individuals with lived experience, funding and lack of knowledge on how to utilise lived experience are among the barriers reported (Veldmeijer, 2023; Muchamore, 2024; Shaw, 2026).
These issues can be mitigated when transforming these experiences into digital lived experiences, such as the interviews developed at The Human Aspect, and that was our initial vision.
The interviews in our library are owned by the interviewees, and our organisation follows strict GDPR rules.
Despite this, we later recognised that a touching video testimony can influence a practitioner's perspective, but it does not tell them which clients to use it with, how to structure a session around it, or what the evidence base is for doing so. Thus, practitioners and researchers lack a framework for integrating digital lived experiences into their work.
Our Solution: A Methodology for Analysing Lived Experience Interviews
Based on this observation and feedback from mental health professionals, we developed Psychological Descriptions (PD): a structured description of an interview produced through a standardised analytical process and reviewed across multiple rounds of feedback. Every new interview now receives a PD as a standard practice.
Each PD contains the following:
Challenge analysis of the individuals’ environment, stressors, symptoms and chronological events of adversity
A coded inventory of coping strategies used by the individual
An applicability section identifying specific target groups with rationale, detailed session-by-session usage protocol, including therapeutic objectives and structured reflection questions
Contextual analysis of the cultural and social factors that shaped the interviewee's experience.
The result is a resource that can be used directly in individual therapy, group work, psychoeducation, and professional training, with the interview as the point of reference, grounded in lived experience.
However, we did not stop there. The next question was how these reports could reach professionals efficiently. We recognised that simply hosting them on our website would not be enough. The natural next step was to begin developing a dedicated platform for mental health professionals, where these resources could be easily accessed and integrated into practice. This led to the creation of the Supporters Platform, which is exclusively available to mental health professionals.
Why this matters for the field
The Psychological Descriptions (PD) framework sits at an intersection that the mental health field has struggled to navigate: between the richness of qualitative human testimony and the rigour that clinical and research practice requires.
We are not aware of another organisation that has developed a standardised protocol of this kind at scale. Most platforms only offer access to stories. The breadth and depth of our interviews (800+ interviews, ranging from 30 to 70 minutes) gives us a strong advantage in developing this PD framework. Further, its replicable methodology for making lived experiences usable has an internal reliability built through structured training for the writers, standardised frameworks and a detailed review process.
We believe our work has implications beyond our own platform, for how research institutions think about lived experience data, for how training programmes use personal testimony, and for how practitioners integrate lived experiences into their work.
What we are looking for
We are at a stage where we want to bring this methodology and our digital platform into dialogue with the research and mental health care community.
We are interested in connecting with researchers, mental health practitioners and academics who work in digital mental health, qualitative methodology, lived experience research, or psychosocial intervention development.
We are open to conversations about research collaborations that explore the PD’s methodology, access to the methodology for researchers who want to understand or build on it, and joint projects that could generate evidence or insights the field needs to engage with lived experience tools more actively. In addition, we wish to connect with mental health professionals who want to use lived experience in their work and help us develop the Supporters Platform further.
If this resonates with your work, we would genuinely like to hear from you.
Reach out to Marina Chrisikopoulou, Head of Research, at marina@thehumanaspect.com.
References
Veldmeijer, L., Terlouw, G., Van Os, J., Van Dijk, O., Van 't Veer, J., & Boonstra, N. (2023). The Involvement of Service Users and People With Lived Experience in Mental Health Care Innovation Through Design: Systematic Review. JMIR mental health, 10, e46590. https://doi.org/10.2196/46590
Muchamore, I., Karanikolas, P., & Gooding, P. (2024). How lived experience expertise shapes research and development in digital mental health: A review of literature and insights. Wellcome. https://wellcomeopenresearch-files.f1000.com/posters/docs/wellcomeopenres-349160.pdf
Shaw, S., Shirley, L., Schroeder, E., Thompson, G., Watt, K., & Forsyth, K. (2026). A systematic review of the barriers and facilitators to lived experience involvement in mental health services. Frontiers in Public Health, 13, Article 1737709. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1737709