Accessibility Tools
Ideas of and issues in co-design and co-production including overcoming barriers.
The experiences of people with lived experience who are part of these workforces are centred throughout the scoping paper. These insights and contributions shine a light on the current landscape and offer an imagining of what the ideal needs to be.
The paper provides recommendations for improving existing training options, career opportunities and support structures to strengthen the lived experience (peer) workforces. They outline key opportunities for growth, expansion, professionalisation and advocacy to ensure lived experience as a unique discipline and skillset is valued, developed and embedded across the mental health and social sectors.
In this article, Aimee Sinclair explores various microaggressions she has experienced in the mental health system, through the lens of her experience as a peer worker.
As advancements are made through processes of social inclusion, disability justice frameworks have emerged to query the limits of rights-based and incorporation strategies by revealing how such practices sustain systems of oppression. Indeed, disability justice has shown how inclusion models position “exclusion” as the problem in need of redress, leaving larger structural issues of inequity unchallenged.
Positioned within the larger field of critical disability studies, mad studies scholars and activists are beginning to reevaluate the consequences of what it means to participate in regimes of power, as we now must deal with what results from being included and recognized by the political apparatuses and technologies that not only manage disability but also produce and sustain it.2 Here I show how the inclusion of peer support workers within dominant mental health service systems is an emerging form of affective labor, which can help orient service users toward feelings and emotions that actually cooperate with psy regimes of governance.
The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System (the Commission) identified major issues and concerns in respect to the mental health workforce and, the same time, recognised the central role of workforce to realising the changes necessary to create foundational reforms in the mental health system.
VMIAC is pleased to see, and be involved in, workforce planning and renewal across the whole of the mental health workforce to ensure new approaches and the development of profoundly different culture. However, our first priority is for the development of a robust, diverse and empowered lived experience workforce, specifically the consumer workforce, and the reorientation of workplaces across the sector to ensure readiness to support, respect and enable the consumer workforce at all
‘People with lived experience need to be employed at every level within the mental health system with real access to decision-making and leadership.’ ‘We need to be in the hospitals, community treatment, planning and management at all levels to make a difference.’
UPSIDES stands for Using Peer Support in Developing Empowering Mental Health Services. The main objective of UPSIDES is to widen access to peer support interventions for people with severe mental illness, by researching sustainable best practice in high-, middle- and low-resource settings.
The UPSIDES project involves scientists, mental health professionals, peer workers and service users from six countries in Europe, Africa and Asia.
The National Mental Health Consumer and Carer Forum and the National Primary Health Network Mental Health Lived Experience Engagement Network acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters on which we work and live on across Australia. We recognise their continuing connection to land, waters, culture and community. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.
“A lived experience recognises the effects of ongoing negative historical impacts and or specific events on the social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It encompasses the cultural, spiritual, physical, emotional and mental wellbeing of the individual, family or community.
“People with lived or living experience of suicide are those who have experienced suicidal thoughts, survived a suicide attempt, cared for someone through a suicidal crisis, been bereaved by suicide or having a loved one who has died by suicide, acknowledging that this experience is significantly different and takes into consideration Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ways of understanding social and emotional wellbeing.” - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lived Experience Centre
We welcome Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to this site and invite them to provide any feedback or items for inclusion.
We also recognise people with lived and living experience of mental ill-health and recovery and the experience of people who are carers, families, kin, or supporters.