More than five years after the murder of George Floyd forced institutions to confront racial injustice, it is worth asking what has actually changed. As an associate professor of forensic psychology, I’ve been considering this question in relation to research – in particular, how universities produce knowledge about the communities that are affected by racial disparities in the UK.
Racially minoritised communities continue to experience consistently poorer mental health outcomes. They are more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act, less likely to access talking therapies early, and more likely to disengage from services that do not feel safe or culturally responsive.
And while universities across the UK have made visible efforts to decolonise knowledge production, diversify research samples and recruit more researchers from minoritised backgrounds, many of the core questions that shape psychological research remain largely unchanged.
Who defines what counts as distress? Is anger framed as pathology rather than a response to racism? Who decides which communities are “hard to reach”? Who determines what meaningful impact looks like? And what importance do we place on the lived experience of researchers?
Whose reality is believed?
Lived experience of a mental health issue can be devalued in favour of clinical, academic and professional knowledge, so that when people describe their distress, these accounts tend to be reframed through clinical interpretation rather than recognised as valid experiences in their own right.
Philospher Miranda Fricker coined the term “epistemic injustice” to describe how certain groups are systematically discredited as knowers.
In psychology, this can mean lived experience being dismissed as anecdotal, while clinical or academic interpretations are treated as objective. When such bias goes unchecked, research questions recycle eurocentric ideas that once pathologised racialised people as “mad”.
Research hierarchies do not just shape evidence; they decide whose realities are believed. Quantitative designs that reduce people to numbers are often positioned as more rigorous, while narrative or participatory approaches are treated as secondary by the research establishment. These hierarchies do not simply reflect preference; they drive funding, shape policy and determine whose realities are treated as credible.
In this context, service users may be invited to contribute to a study or help answer a research question. But if that question has already been defined within institutional and governmental priorities, it probably won’t make any difference. The power that shapes research agendas operates long before anyone is asked to take a seat at the table.
The same dynamics shape the expectations of researchers. Trainees in the Beyond Academia initiative I was recently involved in described tension between bringing their lived experience into their work and conforming to norms of neutrality and detachment. This reflects a broader assumption within psychology that objectivity requires distance, which quietly preserves existing hierarchies.
From the margins to the centre
Beyond Academia was designed to move underrepresented voices from the margins of research to its centre, and to challenge how future practitioners from the global majority approach mental health research in racially minoritised communities – including how to navigate their own lived experiences.
We encouraged them to question dominant psychological frameworks which can, for example, interpret distress as individual dysfunction, rather than as a response to racism, inequality or experience. The aim was to create space to question and rethink whose knowledge is treated as authoritative.
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One trainee researching black men in prison described rethinking their approach. Instead of asking why services were not being accessed, they began to question how those services were experienced, and how their research could increase access.
Confronting this legacy means examining how privilege and historical ideas still shape what psychology recognises as legitimate knowledge, and whether researchers reproduce existing hierarchies or challenge them.
This kind of approach sits within a broader shift in mental health research, which aims to incorporate the lived experience of service users – so-called co-production models, where researchers and communities are expected to work together more collaboratively.
But while research that surfaces previously unheard voices of racially marginalised people is welcome, it does not necessarily translate into shared power over setting agendas, building theories or deciding what counts as impact.
All research is shaped by perspective, and theories are developed within cultural contexts. Far from undermining rigour of the trainees in our initiative, acknowledging the political and emotional dimensions of their work strengthened their ethical practice in systems defined by surveillance, coercion and harm.
Community-rooted knowledge
There is now a clear need for psychological research to move beyond representation toward power. One starting point is to rethink what counts as legitimate evidence. This means collective first-hand narratives of distress and experiential knowledge should shape mainstream psychological research, not sit at its edges.
This is not secondary science – it is rigorous science. When researchers are honest about their perspective and work with people who see the world differently, the research is stronger and more useful.
If psychology is to remain relevant in diverse societies, it must move beyond viewing certain communities primarily as subjects of study, to being partners in knowledge creation.
Diversifying who enters academic spaces matters. So does diversifying who participates in studies. But unless the discipline confronts who shapes research agendas and whose knowledge is treated as authoritative, inequality will simply be reproduced in subtler forms.
Psychology already has the tools to examine power, bias and social context. The question is whether it is willing to use them.
