World Mental Health Day: the importance of this year’s theme
WMHD rolls round for another year and 2026’s theme is one that really resonates: Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change. Essentially it’s exploring - or inviting people to explore - the impact that people with lived experience (PWLE) of mental illness can have in mental health systems.
In other words, people like me.
To me - and many others - this seems like an obvious win. After all, who knows better than someone who has gone through a mental health service what it’s really like. Not just the service you were promised but the actual reality of it on the receiving end. Because believe me, the difference between promise and reality can be vast.
Think of it as a bit like when city planners put pathways in public spaces, only to find that the ‘desire lines’, the natural pathways that people choose, are somewhere else entirely. Today, many planners will avoid building paths until they’ve seen where those desire lines appear. In other words, they’re led by the people living the experience every day. Seems like a no-brainer doesn’t it?
If I’ve still not convinced you, there are two main compelling factors to my mind as to why we should be engaging and empowering PWLE:
There are some things you just can’t learn from a book, no matter how hard you study. Especially when you’re talking about something as nuanced and complex as mental illness. Engaging with people who have real-world personal experience can help experts better explore mental illness, going beyond an understanding of the symptoms to an understanding of what it feels like to experience those symptoms and what it means to be in treatment.
A better understanding of what it is to have a mental illness and navigate mental health services can only result in more people-centred systems, which hopefully are more responsive to people’s needs and concerns. Surely this can only ever be a good thing and keeps parity with the general shift by the NHS to people-centred care. The ambition is already there from the health service and meaningfully engaging PWLE provides a clear path to enable it.
The goal of the World Health Organization is to create opportunities for people to influence decisions, co-design services, strengthen peer-led approaches, challenge stigma and strengthen accountability. All things I passionately support and - like to think when it comes to peer-to-peer support and challenging stigma - that I already play a small role in contributing towards, albeit on a personal rather than system level.
However, my personal experience tells me that maybe we need to start a little smaller. Yes, I want all those system-level things to happen and there are some brilliant advocates who I have no doubt will be successful in pushing for these changes and overcoming the resistance to the concept. But my various experiences in therapy and assessments to try and access psychological support have shown that even on a 1-2-1 level, things are still going wrong in not trusting and accepting the experience of the individual. Yes sometimes we need to be challenged - I hate that bit of therapy but I know it’s one of the most important bits! But failing to accept what that individual is saying doesn’t help anybody.
A recent experience: at an assessment for eating disorder services I was asked about my Generalised Anxiety Disorder and if I felt this was the biggest issue. I explained that wasn’t the case, that I have good coping techniques for day-to-day anxiety but what I needed help with was body dysmorphia, my eating patterns / falling back into bad habits and learning to cope with a changing and aging body. I felt heard at the time but a week later I had a response from the team saying that because my main issue was generalised anxiety I should refer back to Talking Therapies. The same Talking Therapies who had previously declined to take me on, saying that my needs weren’t generalised but specific to an eating disorder and therefore only the eating disorder unit could help! I felt pushed from pillar to post - at a time when I was already feeling vulnerable it really felt like everyone was just trying to get me off their waiting list and nobody was willing to help.
Fortunately, I have previously had a brilliant therapist who helped me recognise that my experience is exactly that: mine. I can’t assume everyone else has the same experience, or that everyone will be interested in understanding mine. But I can learn to advocate for myself - this was incredibly empowering, that realisation that others may have the same illness as me, or be a highly specialised expert, but nobody better understands my body, my brain and my reality, than me. She helped me fight for myself and I used those skills on this occasion.
Ultimately I was successful (and am now on a very long waiting list) but it has severely knocked my confidence, which was already low, in the system and the willingness of the service to want to support. It takes a lot to ask for help and it really shouldn’t be so much of a fight to access it, no matter how long the waiting lists.
So yes, we absolutely need to recognise, celebrate and enable PWLE to shape and influence a more people-centred care. At all levels. And the quicker we can enable that transition, the better for all of us.
Those that are interested in the topic can read more here. And those who feel like they might benefit from talking to a Mental Health First Aider can find out more about the State of Us directory, many of us with lived experience, here.
