Chapter 11: Honouring ‘That What is Most Important’: Listening to the Voices of Young People With Experiences of Mental Health Difficulties

Researchers play an essential, and indeed powerful, role in honouring and empowering the voices of people from marginalised communities. This chapter seeks to step beyond the already comprehensive ethical and methodological literature on ‘doing’ research by offering a reflection on the less articulated, but no less substantiative, aspects of conducting qualitative research with those for whom that which is most important, as the writer Audrey Lorde suggests, must be spoken. The delicate dance of interest and objectivity, a tolerance of not knowing and uncertainty and the willingness to hold competing truths with equal reverence are discussed and illuminated with examples from my own research with young people with experiences of mental health difficulties. This chapter is offered with the intention of foregrounding some of the more tacit, but no less bruising, aspects of the research interplay. Equally, it is offered in the hope that, in bringing into the open our limitations and vulnerabilities as researchers, we might be better positioned to understand, indeed honour, that which is most important for those in distress.