In this episode, Craig is joined by Lyn Mahboub, who has worked in the lived experience space for around 22 years. Lyn came to this work through her own experiences of mental distress and substance use, and a desire to change the system after her encounters with it. Among many roles, she co-chaired the lived experience advisory group during the development of WA’s Mental Health Act 2014.
Lyn describes lived experience work as a social justice discipline with roots in the civil rights movement, and the principles that guide WA’s lived experience peer workforce framework. Craig and Lyn discuss the shift from representation to genuine leadership, siloed and service-centric systems, the “gaps” people are pushed into between mental health and alcohol and other drug services, and the social determinants of distress, including housing as suicide prevention. They also unpack the term “serious mental illness”, explore alternative ways of understanding distress such as the Hearing Voices approach, the Power Threat Meaning Framework and Open Dialogue, and consider informed choice around neuroleptics. Lyn closes with a simple message for the community: listen without fixing.
You can see more about Lyn’s academic work here: https://profiles.curtin.edu.au/2450-lyn-mahboub
You can read more about Open Dialogue here: https://www.rethink.org/news-and-stories/commonly-asked-mental-health-questions/what/what-is-the-open-dialogue-approach-in-mental-health/
Consumers of Mental Health WA also have a number of resources worth looking at:
https://comhwa.org.au/
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