— Discussion and Analysis
Ideas of and issues in co-design and co-production including overcoming barriers.
Abstract
Authors Patralis, C and Lived Experience Australia, 2025
This paper invites discussion and strategic reflection on the current and future role of Lived Experience, Consumer, and Carer Peer workers in the mental health system. With momentum building across policy and service sectors, it is timely to ensure that peer roles are not only expanded but meaningfully implemented. The value of peer support must not be just in crisis moments but as a sustained, embedded form of care.
Background
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.
Summary
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.
Summary
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.
Summary
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.’