What was your motivation for wanting to work in this area?

I guess from my own experience of the mental health system and different kinds of therapies. I know that I wanted to be a part of mental health services and try to support other people who are struggling. I wasn’t sure at first whether I would have the mental resilience to do it, as I also had to look after myself. So, to test if I had the resilience, I studied health and social care and then I worked as a support worker for people with learning disabilities. I was looking after myself, so that showed me I can do this. While I was a support worker, I finished dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) and it definitely put me on a different kind of trajectory. DBT helped me to notice that there is never one way to look at something – it’s about noticing different sides of a dialectic, and that all perspectives are valid.

I got an email about the IMROC Peer Support course. I fell in love with it, I really, really enjoyed it. It got me thinking and I was asked if I had seen the advert for the lived experience practitioner role and it was very spontaneous, so I went for it.

I’m just so passionate about raising awareness and cleaning up misunderstandings about the stigma around mental health and the impact of trauma that we go through. It shapes us but doesn’t shape us in a bad way, it doesn’t mean “that’s it, we’re broken forever”. That is what I used to believe, but now I know that’s not true.

In your role, what changes do you notice?

I would like to start with the changes within the people we work with. We have had quite a journey over the last 18 months. We started attending the Service User Network (SUN) groups and we didn’t really know how to navigate being a co-producing team. For example, language is a big thing and sometimes we have noticed language that we haven’t found particularly helpful. Sometimes, the language used can create a bias and misunderstanding between people, so it’s only normal they would want to challenge things that are said.

Some things that have changed this year is, instead of festering on things and things getting taken away from our supervision space and our team space, we are talking about things openly and saying, this is my perspective and yours might be different. There have been conversations together and we have explored different things this year which has made a substantial change, it feels safer to have these conversations now. Everyone has their own voice and their own opinions, just like the core professionals do because everyone does.