Successes, Failures, and Lessons Learned Using Community-Based Participatory Research to Address Health Inequities among People with Serious Mental Illness

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged as a transformative research paradigm that can help bridge the gap between science and practice by increasing community engagement and social action in the development, planning, and implementation of health care interventions to address health inequities. Over the past 9 years, our group has developed two community-engaged studies supported by the National Institute of Mental Health that focus on addressing health and health care disparities faced by people with serious mental illness. In this workshop, we will describe how we used CBPR principles to develop and sustain community academic partnerships to inform the adaptation and implementation of health interventions for people with SMI from racially and ethnically diverse communities. We will discuss the strategies and methods used to develop these studies, present both successes and failures of our experiences partnering with community agencies, and summarize lessons learned from these studies.