Accessibility Tools
Ideas of and issues in co-design and co-production including overcoming barriers.
This podcast episode features Geoff, who works as a peer specialist in acute care in a major mental health hospital in Adelaide. Geoff speaks about his own journey towards peer work, and how both his story and passion for arts has informed the recovery groups he runs with consumers.
The intention is for the Strategy for the Family Carer Workforce in Victoria (the Strategy) to support resourcing and planning for the family carer workforce training and development over the coming years. It is envisaged that initiatives from the strategy will be family carer led, in collaboration with other partners, with aspects of the Strategy requiring government investment and other organisational support to implement.
The main aim of this submission is to advocate the role that an adequately valued and resourced Lived Experience (peer) workforce can play in progressing the Commission’s reform agenda.
‘Lived Experience Leadership features the findings of 12 years of research studies focused on this workforce in a range of settings, to foster a better of understanding and respect for Lived Experience as a distinct discipline and build clarity on what makes this work unique and valuable.
Importantly, this body of research was led by Lived Experience researchers.
Those of us identifying as Lived Experience Researchers have over 35 years experience working in many Lived Experience roles, including peer support, education, training, and systemic advocacy positions across various sectors and settings. We are very connected with the wider Lived Experience community. Lived Experience is our discipline or main lens.
Those of us identifying as Researchers with lived experience have another discipline or lens we primarily work from but see our personal lived experience as an important component of who we are and the way we approach research.
The shift towards recovery-oriented mental health care has led to the extensive growth of peer support in contemporary service delivery. When enacting peer support, peer workers (PWs) use their lived experiences of mental illness to provide support to individuals experiencing mental health difficulties. While PWs are increasingly an integrated part of mental health services, the way in which peer support unfolds in everyday practices remains understudied.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from Danish mental health centres, this paper investigates how peer workers and users enact experiential knowledge and expertise to support one another. Theoretically, this paper draws on a micro-sociological approach that comprehends expertise as an interactional accomplishment enacted within institutional arrangements. First, the analysis shows how PWs and users develop affective relations based on shared illness experiences that enable the enactment of expertise. Second, it demonstrates how PWs and users engage in these relations by exchanging sympathy and knowledge according to different situational demands. Third, it shows how experiences of relational limitations make service users contest the value of experiential knowledge and PWs' position as valid experts. Centrally, this paper contributes to a general discussion of expertise and the implications of bringing lived experiences into mental health services.
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.