Allyship in Psychiatric and Mental Health Services: A Scoping Review and Thematic Analysis.
Pierre Pariseau-Legault, Clara Lessard-Deschênes, Sophie Sergerie-Richard and 3 others
PMID 42347705WHAT IT FOUND
Allyship in mental health services meant listening more than speaking, acknowledging systemic injustice, and supporting patients to speak for themselves.
This review mapped those ideas; it did not show that allyship improves patient outcomes.
Key findings
01The review analysed 27 scientific articles or book chapters and 7 editorials or commentaries, and identified four themes about allyship.
02Allyship was described as active listening, persuasion, risk-taking, advocacy and self-advocacy, with allies encouraged to facilitate rather than save patients.
03Ten of the 27 articles focused on experts-by-experience roles in academic settings, and most included reports used qualitative or discursive methods.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The review did not check the methodological quality of the included studies, so weak studies are not separated from stronger ones. Much of the literature is qualitative, discursive or opinion-based, so it describes ideas rather than testing whether allyship changes patient outcomes. The evidence is concentrated in Australia and in a cluster of studies using the same dataset, so it may reflect a narrow research network. The review searched only English and French publications and focused on mental health, so it may have missed allyship debates from other languages or disciplines. Participant counts are hard to interpret because many studies did not clearly identify who was an ally, and large quantitative studies dominated the participant count. The concept of allyship itself is contested, and the review did not resolve whether terms such as accomplice are more useful.
Declared interests
The work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that allyship improves patient outcomes. The review mapped how allyship is described, did not assess study quality, and found mostly qualitative or discursive work rather than tested clinical effects.