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Home > Our Members > Members’ bulletin

Members’ bulletin

We send out a weekly bulletin to the NSUN membership, a network of people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress or trauma.

If you want to share something with the membership by placing an item in our bulletin, please read the submission guidelines below (especially if you are submitting a request to share an involvement opportunity or job/volunteer post).

To subscribe to our weekly bulletin, become a member for free.

Recent e-bulletins

If you are signed up as a member but are not receiving the bulletin, please check your spam or junk folders and if they have been going into these folders, add us as a safe sender/contact. If they are not coming through at all, please contact us at info@nsun.org.uk.

What is the NSUN bulletin?

The NSUN bulletin is a weekly mailing sent to the membership (usually on Mondays) containing updates from NSUN, blogs and articles, events and news, opportunities for involvement and influencing, recruitment for jobs or volunteering positions in the sector, and funding pots for user-led groups.

Items are sourced from within and beyond the membership and focus on the mental health lived experience space. Its purpose is to:

  • Share articles/blogs/vlogs/podcasts, events and news, involvement opportunities such as surveys/calls for research participants, jobs, and funding for groups
  • Share NSUN’s work/news, as well as opportunities with NSUN
  • Link up and network members (including connecting individuals to groups and vice versa)
  • Amplify members’ work or campaigns
  • Reach those without social media.

“The NSUN bulletin is my number one way of keeping up to date with what is happening in the lived experience/survivor “world” and keeping me connected.“

“The bulletin is one of the best sources of information for user led and radical mental health thinking and organizing that I have come across.“

cartoon people in shades of blue, yellow, pink and white

Feedback from NSUN members

Disclaimer

The aim is not for the bulletin to be an exhaustive list of events, research and opportunities, but to inform and circulate knowledge to our members. Inclusion of an item is not an endorsement from NSUN of the item or its source. Sometimes, we may include items that you (and we) may not necessarily agree with. We aim to give members a choice of what they do or do not want to engage with. We receive many requests to include items and the wording of items are almost always those of the source, rather than the NSUN team, though we may try to summarise just the key information in order to keep the bulletin as accessible as possible.

Submission guidelines

We get a very high number of requests to include items, especially research adverts, and we limit the number of items in each section to ensure the bulletin is of a manageable length and readable to members. This means that we cannot accept every request to place an item in the bulletin.

Overall, we prioritise survivor-led/lived experience-led items, and may not be able to place items that do not meet this description. We can usually only run a particular item for a maximum of two weeks (space permitting – sometimes we may only be able to include it in one bulletin). Please let us know if you want to make sure your item is only run for one week.

We reserve the right to not publish all items submitted. We may not be able to enter into correspondence with you about why your item was not included.

Submitting an item

The bulletin is split into categories of items every week. Please find below the specific submission guidelines for items in each category. After reading these, to submit an item to the bulletin, please email us at info@nsun.org.uk with a (roughly) 100-200 word summary for the item. Please note that we can hyperlink to webpages where people can find more information but we can not add images or file attachments, and the item needs to be in plaintext form for accessibility reasons.

1. Articles, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts 

  • The main focus of this section is first person pieces written or made by people with lived experience of mental ill-health, trauma, or distress, or of marginalisation that intersects with mental health.
  • We may include articles/blogs that are of note or interest to members that are not explicitly written or made by someone with lived experience – usually this will be articles about news/relevant policy developments.
  • We will not include articles/blogs etc. that offer direct advice (though we may make exceptions in circumstances where we feel confident that the advice would not have potentially harmful unintended consequences), or that are ultimately intended to sell products or services.

2. Events and membership news

  • We prioritise events and membership news, including campaign actions, from lived experience/user-led groups and projects rather than larger organisations or institutions.
  • We usually only share events that are free or with the option for free tickets on a sliding scale, but may make exceptions in certain circumstances e.g. if ticket costs are low and/or proceeds go to lived experience-led/user-led grassroots groups or initiatives.

3. Surveys and involvement opportunities 

Please carefully read the following before submitting a survey or research (or other) involvement opportunity:

We receive a very high number of requests to circulate research adverts and are not able to publish all that we receive. We only place calls for sufficiently paid/lived experience-led involvement opportunities (see below). We will also only share items that are very directly connected to our own areas of work as an organisation, and we reserve the right not to circulate calls for participants if we have any ethical concerns about the project (e.g. we are not confident that the support offered to participants is adequate, especially if the topic may be particularly triggering). We are very unlikely to circulate calls for people to be test subjects of (or implicitly endorse the acceptability of) new forms of treatment/therapy, particularly if app/technology based, due to ethical concerns.

  • We only include surveys and involvement opportunities (such as requests for research/study participants) that 1) offer payment for participants’ time and expertise, with payment at least in line with NIHR payment rates, which we are using as a benchmark, and/or 2) are survivor-led or lived experience-led research/projects, which means they are fully or majority-led by people with first hand lived experience of mental ill-health, trauma or distress/the research topic, usually in independent contexts.
    • We may consider sharing items about projects that have been genuinely co-produced with people with lived experience who have had significant and paid input into its development, but prioritise paid and fully lived experience-led opportunities. If a project is co-produced, but not in an independent or grassroots context (e.g. it is within the NHS or a major charity/research institution) we will usually only place the item if sufficient payment is offered, especially at times when we are experiencing a high volume of requests to advertise studies.
    • This means that we may not be able to place items calling for participants for student research projects, of which we receive a very high number.
  • Please provide an explanation of how your study meets the requirements outlined above for our consideration when you are contacting us to ask us to share your advert. You must send a plaintext summary (we are not able to circulate attachments/posters/images etc) of a maximum of 200 words for the bulletin item itself, including the following key information: 
    • Suggested title and subtitle for the bulletin item (title should be a short summary of the research topic, subtitle should be the organisation/institutional affiliation, if applicable), details of the commitment/eligibility, nature of the project (e.g. if applicable, academic level of research study e.g. MSc/MA, PhD), exact payment, and your name/contact details, with a link to where people can find more information online if applicable.

Please note: we encourage researchers to offer different options for ways people could engage with/contribute to research, which is also why we ask for your contact details for the bulletin item for people to get in touch with you about other ways to contribute if a survey, for example, is not accessible to them. We also urge researchers planning on submitting study participation requests to have first thought carefully about ethical considerations, including the impact participation could have on people, and put into place adequate measures to offer support to participants. For activities such as interviews, you should have a thorough participation information sheet to provide to potential participants which outlines the support that is on offer to participants and your data processing, confidentiality, consent and safeguarding procedures.

Where else might you be able to submit your request for research participants?

The following organisations may accept requests for their newsletters and other communications:

4. Jobs and recruitment 

  • We focus on/prioritise jobs which have direct (first hand) lived experience of mental ill-health/trauma/distress (or other closely connected experiences) at the heart of them (reflected in the person specification), prioritising jobs in DDPOs (Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations)/user-led organisations within or connected with mental health.
  • We can only place items about unpaid/volunteering positions if they are within user-led groups/DDPOs (usually grassroots/community groups led by and for people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress, or trauma, or other relevant experiences/identities).
  • Since for many of us, our lived experience is current, we do not place adverts for job opportunities that require “recovery” from mental ill-health/trauma/distress.
  • Within the 100-200 word job summary for the bulletin item, please provide key details such as the salary, contract type/length, location, and application deadline.

Please note: we urge organisations that are not user-led/lived experience-led but that are creating “lived experience”-focussed roles, such as within the NHS, to place direct lived experience as essential rather than desirable criteria so that people with direct experience are not disadvantaged in the selection of the successful candidate.

5. Funding 

We have moved our funding for groups section to a page on our website, but will continue to place items notifying members of new grants and funding opportunities in the bulletin when they become available. Please send us information on any grants you find that you think would be of interest to the user-led groups and organisations in the NSUN network.