Co-Design with the Inclusive Research Network

Abstract Background People with intellectual disability are not always included in research. When they are, it is usually as participants. We are a group of researchers with and without intellectual disability. We have been doing research together for 15 years. We usually work on projects that other people have decided on. Objective We wanted to choose a project that was important to us. We wanted to design a mental health toolkit that helps us look after our mental health and the people around us. We talked about how we have co-designed this project. We will use action research methods to develop our toolkit. We will ask people with intellectual disability how they look after their mental health. We will ask how they support their peers as well. It is important that our research is inclusive, so we will use interviews and Talking Mats to find answers. Methods We came up with prompts to structure this article. We answered the prompts in our regular meetings. We thought about how we have found the co-design process so far. Morag wrote down our answers during the meeting. We talked about how to make our answers easy to understand using simple language. Morag then put pictures next to our answers. We went through the article as a group and made changes. We made sure it was accessible. Findings We talked about how we co-designed the project. We talked about the challenges we had. We talked about what we have learnt so far.