For World Mental Health Day, the global theme is “Lived Experiences Heard.” Three new studies show how much hearing is still left to do.
On October 10, World Mental Health Day, the World Federation for Mental Health is asking organizations everywhere to hold events under one theme: “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.” The federation announced it in August and tied it to the World Health Organization’s work to move mental health care out of institutions and into communities.
The theme names something mental health services have been saying for twenty years. People who have lived through a crisis know things a clinician can’t learn from a textbook, and many of them now work inside the system as peer support workers. Three papers published this year looked at what happens to them once they get there.
Hired for their experience, doubted for it
In the UK, Trishna Chauhan of the University of Lancashire interviewed 36 peer support workers in the National Health Service and 34 staff who work alongside them. The study, in the International Journal of Mental Health Systems, found stigma at two levels. Some of it was quiet: peer workers’ knowledge set aside, a patronizing tone in meetings, their competence questioned, their voices left out of decisions.
One peer worker described asking for advice about a problem at work and being told, each time, that maybe they were not “well enough” for the job. A workplace concern was heard as a symptom. Peer workers are hired because of their history, and that same history becomes the easiest way to wave off what they say.
In Melbourne, Olivia Hatchman and colleagues at the Lively Collective interviewed seven lived experience workers and seven clinicians for the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing. They found role confusion and lived expertise that was routinely undervalued, and they warned that bringing lived experience into services risks being “symbolic rather than transformative.” As one lived experience worker put it, without formal credentials, “you have to work twice as hard.”
What STARs recognize
Anyone who has left a Toxic Abusive Relationship knows this pattern from the inside. You describe what is happening to you, and the description is turned back on you as proof that something is wrong with you. Being doubted by the people who are supposed to help can feel like the same relationship all over again.
That is why this year’s theme matters to STARs. An invitation into the room is the first step. Being believed once you are in it is what changes anything.
Recovery is bigger than a symptom score
The third paper comes from Ireland. Writing in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, Mike Watts of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland reflects on his own recovery and on peer support, and he describes recovery as “a re-enchantment with life.” Fewer symptoms is part of it. The rest is a life that feels worth living again, with other people in it.
Clinical services are built to measure the first part. Peer communities are often where the rest happens.
Where fellowship starts
TAR Anon® began from lived experience and built outward. Every meeting is co-facilitated by trained STAR Mentors, who come up through the fellowship themselves, and nobody in the room has to prove they are well enough to speak. What a STAR knows about their own life counts from the first meeting.
TAR Anon does not replace therapy or clinical care, and STAR Network does not claim it cures anything. It gives survivors a place where their experience is treated as knowledge.
This World Mental Health Day, if you are a STAR, TAR Anon meetings are free and anonymous, and they meet online. You can find them at starnetwork.org/taranon.
