How Do Sensory Challenges Shape Life With Serious Mental Illness?

This summer, we invite you to explore the experiences and accomplishments of our 2025-2026 Bass Connections project teams. This series features team-written profiles that showcase the discoveries, challenges and impact of teams who spent the year tackling real-world problems.

For the past two years, the Community Living with Mental Illness: A Sensory Health Initiative team has been developing a screening tool to help community mental health providers identify sensory health barriers affecting adults with serious mental illness (SMI). Through interviews with patients, caregivers and providers, the team identified key challenges and used stakeholder feedback to refine a practical tool to support successful community living.

This team was led by Antoine Bailliard (School of Medicine: Orthopaedic Surgery, Occupational Therapy) and MaryBeth Gallagher (School of Medicine: Orthopaedic Surgery, Occupational Therapy).

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By: Members of the Community Living with Mental Illness: A Sensory Health Initiative team

Sensory processing challenges affect how people experience and respond to everyday sights, sounds, touch and other sensations, which can make daily activities and environments harder to manage. Despite the prevalence of sensory processing challenges in adults with serious mental illness (SMI), few tools exist to help community mental health providers identify and address these difficulties in their clients. 

In this study, we sought to develop screening tools to be used by community mental health providers to identify sensory challenges that may interfere with their clients’ functional independence and wellbeing. To do so, we applied a participatory, community-based research approach centered around interviews with three key interest-holder groups: adults with SMI; caregivers of adults with SMI; and providers of community mental health services. 

Our work this year consisted of three main phases: performing interviews with key interest holders, coding interview transcripts to identify major themes in our data, and developing a screen based on these themes using an iterative, team-based approach. We developed three screens aimed at each of our three interest holders. 

Our team includes an interdisciplinary cohort of Duke undergraduates, occupational therapy graduate students and faculty leads Drs. Antoine Bailliard and MaryBeth Gallagher. Our research group was divided into two main teams: an analysis team focused on coding interviews and a development team focused on translating applying their findings to develop the screen. 

Across our interviews, two major themes emerged. First, our interviews and analyses revealed a critical gap in mental health practice. Specifically, providers and clients expressed a lack of tools and frameworks to recognize and understand sensory processing difficulties. Second, sensory challenges consistently affected the ability of adults with SMI to meaningfully participate in everyday activities. 

Notably, adults with SMI frequently experiencing pain due to sensory stimuli in the context of their everyday activities, such as showering, washing dishes and cooking. This finding is significant because community mental health workers often misinterpret these experiences as a lack of motivation to clean or shower. Sensory pain is a topic that is underrepresented in current SMI and sensory processing literature. Together, our findings highlight components of lived sensory experience that are overlooked in mental health research and demonstrate the critical need for tools to address sensory health.

Key strengths in our work included our community-based approach to data collection, which allowed us to center the voices of those most directly impacted by the development of our screen. In addition, the in-depth, semi-structured nature of our interviews allowed for a more nuanced and holistic incorporation of the lived experiences of interest-holders into our tool. 

Additionally, our team-based, iterative approach to data analysis and tool development ensured that our screening tools were continuously refined in response to emerging findings, and that they were developed with input from perspectives across disciplines. 

In the coming academic year, we plan to continue conducting interest-holder feedback interviews to revise and develop our screens, with the goal of deploying them for a pilot study with community mental health teams. In doing so, we hope to address the critical gap in sensory health tools available to mental health providers and contribute to a broader shift in how sensory health is addressed in mental health care.

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Learn More

• Browse additional news and updates from Bass Connections.
• Explore additional teams in the Brain & Society theme.
• Learn about the project team experience through stories from students.