Welcome to Veenu Gupta

Veenu Gupta joins the Discovery Research Platform as Assistant Professor in Lived Experience Research, based in the Psychology department, working closely with ReCoCo at the Wellspring site. 

Veenu is a lived experience researcher who has experience of psychosis and of using early intervention in psychosis services. She has previously engaged in expert by experience work in clinical psychology courses at University of Leicester and University of Liverpool (2016-2022) and noted it had a profound impact on her wellbeing and identity.  Following on from an MSc at Leicester in Psychological Research Methods (2017-2018), she chose to explore this field further in her PhD work at University of Liverpool from 2019-2023, which focused on understanding the identity, empowerment and recovery of those who engage in lived experience work to see if their experiences were similar or different to her own. 

She is now particularly interested in understanding the support needs of lived experience researchers and providers as they often navigate multiple identities such as the professional or the service user, and belong to multiple intersections, with different levels of power and status. She is currently developing reflexive peer supervision that can help them to navigate the challenges and negotiation of identities that these roles require. 

At Durham she will take a focus on understanding the experiences of both trainers and students at ReCoCo, including broad areas around challenges, health inequalities and epistemic injustice that might impact those in lived experience roles, using mixed methodologies including qualitative, arts based and visual approaches, participatory and quantitative approaches amongst other mediums. The focus of research is flexible and will be developed in collaboration with ReCoCo. 

Veenu continues to be involved in research that is intimately connected to her lived experiences and is currently Service user Advisor to the National Clinical Audit of Psychosis and has helped inform national policy for NHS England, including the Access and Waiting Time Standard for Early Intervention in Psychosis services. She is also currently a co-applicant on the EXTEND Early Intervention in Psychosis Study, the PUMA study (Psychosis Treatments Using Multi-Arm multi trials) and the South Asian and Psychosis study. 

We warmly welcome Veenu to Durham University and look forward to working with her! 

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