World Mental Health Day is observed on October 10 to raise awareness about mental health issues around the world and mobilize efforts to support this cause.
Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the main theme of this year’s observance is: “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change.”
World Mental Health Day is an opportunity to meaningfully engage people with lived experience of mental disorders and to recognize that their knowledge on the subject is a vital form of experience. This year’s campaign calls for their voices to guide the policies, services, and decisions that affect them.
“Firsthand experience” refers to what an individual has personally experienced, especially when those experiences provide insights or an understanding that people who only know about such experiences through hearsay or reading lack.
We often ask people with firsthand experience to share their stories, but we exclude them from decision-making. Meaningful participation goes beyond simply listening to their voices.
Meaningful participation means creating opportunities for people to influence decisions, participate in the design of services, strengthen peer-led approaches, challenge stigma, and reinforce accountability. When people with lived experience are included in decision-making, mental health systems can become more person-centered, adopt a more rights-based approach, and respond to people’s needs and concerns.
A key priority for people with lived experience is to move away from long-term psychiatric institutions toward community-based, person-centered mental health care. Institutions tend to isolate individuals and, in many cases, are associated with poor-quality care, coercion, and human rights abuses.
Deinstitutionalization requires a carefully planned shift in funding, services, and support so that people can live in their communities. To address this priority, the WHO will publish practical guidelines on deinstitutionalization.
That is why one of the central goals of this observance is to combat stigma, so that the firsthand knowledge of service users can be used to identify flaws in the system and improve the quality of public care.
On this year’s World Mental Health Day, the WHO calls on us to move from listening to taking action, and to build mental health systems together with people who have lived experience—not just for them.
By: Juan Carlos Ugarelli.
