What can bureaucratic justice do for mental health?

Primary health services are an essential part of the response to the UK’s mental health crisis. Although service delivery may seem secondary to treatment, our early engagement with those navigating primary care pathways for common mental health problems has shown us how accessing and engaging with support often involves struggling with bureaucratic processes, and leaves them with a sense of unjust treatment. This is more than just frustrating or a problem in principle; research across disciplines suggests that perceptions of just treatment can significantly impact treatment outcomes by affecting engagement, deterring future support-seeking, and exacerbating inequalities. This research programme pioneers the application of the theory of ‘bureaucratic justice’ in primary mental health services. The proposed programme will deploy an innovative combination of a longitudinal quantitative and qualitative study with participatory storytelling methods to produce a new understanding of the nature and relevance of just treatment in the context of how people interact with frontline administrative processes in primary care mental health services. It will also build an interdisciplinary community of researchers and provide a platform to embed lived experiences of seeking mental health support into research practices in innovative and engaging ways.