World Mental Health Day: Why Lived Experience Matters in Recovery

You can read books and articles about anxiety and still have no idea what it’s like to sit in your car outside the grocery store, panicking, trying to convince yourself to go inside.

You can study addiction, understand what alcohol and drugs do to the brain, and recognise all the warning signs. But all that knowledge doesn’t make you understand what it’s like to wake up every morning promising yourself that today will be different, only to find yourself doing the same thing by evening.

We gain knowledge through education, and then we gain knowledge through experience. When it comes to mental health and recovery, both have something important to offer.

October 10 is World Mental Health Day, a day dedicated to raising awareness about mental health and encouraging conversations that many people still find difficult to have. Awareness matters, of course, but how often do we stop to listen to the people who actually live with depression, anxiety, trauma, and addiction?

Their experiences are valuable and can teach us things that don’t always make it into textbooks or treatment manuals.

What do we mean by lived experience?

You’ve probably heard the term lived experience, especially if you’ve spent much time reading about mental health or addiction. This statement simply refers to the knowledge someone gains from personally going through something.

A psychologist may spend years studying depression, but someone who has lived with it knows what it’s like to struggle to get out of bed or feel completely alone in a room full of people. A counsellor may understand the science behind addiction, but someone in addiction recovery understands the complicated relationship between desperately wanting to stop yet not being able to stop.

These aren’t competing perspectives. Professional training provides the clinical knowledge needed to treat mental health conditions. Personal experience adds another kind of understanding, especially when it comes to what living with those conditions looks and feels like.

Lived experience isn’t limited to people who have completed treatment or reached a certain point in recovery. Someone who is still struggling has something worth contributing. We sometimes talk about people with lived experience as though they must have a successful recovery story before anyone should listen to them, but people don’t suddenly become worth listening to once their lives are going well.

Why being understood can change everything

One of the loneliest parts of struggling with mental health or addiction is believing that nobody else could possibly understand what you’re going through.

Someone going through depression may feel guilty because they have a good job and a loving family, and they don’t understand why they can’t “snap out of” how they feel. A person struggling with alcohol may spend a lot of time convincing themselves that because they’re still working and paying their bills, they can’t be that bad.

Then let’s say they meet someone who has been through something similar. Maybe it’s someone in a support group or a friend who finally opens up about their own struggles. For the first time, they may feel comfortable telling the truth about what’s happening.

When someone talks openly about the shame, fear or exhaustion they’ve been trying so hard to hide, it becomes a little easier to believe you’re not the only person who has felt this way. For people who have spent years hiding their struggles, that kind of understanding can make asking for help feel less scary.

Peer support: When experience helps someone else

Recovery involves much more than appointments with therapists, doctors and other healthcare professionals. It also involves relationships with people who have experienced similar struggles.

Peer support is based on this idea. People who have personally gone through mental health challenges or addiction use what they’ve learned to support others. Sometimes this happens through organised programmes led by trained peer support workers, and other times it happens more organically in recovery meetings or support groups.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada has developed guidelines for peer support that recognise the importance of shared experience, mutual respect and hope in recovery. Effective peer support also involves listening, respecting boundaries and recognising that each person has to find their own way forward.

Think about someone who is newly sober and attending their first recovery meeting. They feel nervous and uncomfortable. Then someone begins sharing an experience that sounds familiar. Maybe they describe making promises they couldn’t keep or feeling ashamed of the things they did while drinking. They also talk about how their life has changed for the better since getting sober.

That person has offered something useful: an example of what recovery might look like.

Peer support doesn’t replace professional treatment. Someone may still need therapy, medication, medical supervision, or residential care, depending on their circumstances. But the power of peer relationships is undeniable. It can provide understanding and hope.

Recovery doesn’t look the same for everyone

We tend to gravitate toward recovery stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end: Someone reaches a breaking point, asks for help, gets help, and makes changes. Life gets better. It’s a satisfying story, and sometimes it’s true. But many people’s experiences are much more complicated.

Someone recovering from depression may have months when they feel well, and then months when symptoms return. A person recovering from addiction may relapse multiple times before finding an approach that works for them. Someone healing from trauma may make extreme progress in one area of life but continue to struggle immensely in another.

Listening to different people’s experiences helps us understand that there isn’t one correct way to recover. For one person, progress might mean returning to work after a long absence. For another, it might mean managing anxiety well enough to attend a family reunion. Someone recovering from addiction might consider it a victory to get through a holiday party without drinking or using drugs.

Something is reassuring about hearing from someone whose recovery hasn’t been straightforward. It challenges the idea that struggling again means you’ve somehow lost all the progress you’ve made.

Recovery is personal, and what helps one person may not be what another person needs. That’s why treatment should leave room for individual circumstances, preferences and goals rather than expecting everyone to follow exactly the same way.

People with lived experience deserve a voice in treatment

Lived experience can also tell us something important about the mental healthcare system itself.

Think about someone who has tried to access treatment but encountered long waiting lists, confusing referral processes, or professionals who didn’t take their concerns seriously. That person understands something about the obstacles to getting help that might not be obvious to someone working within the system.

Or think about someone who has completed residential treatment. They may be able to explain which parts of the programme helped them feel supported, what made them uncomfortable, and whether they felt involved in decisions about their care.

These different perspectives can help improve mental health services.

In its 2023 framework for meaningful engagement, the World Health Organization emphasises how important it is to include those with lived experience in developing health policies, programmes, and services. The idea is fairly straightforward: people affected by mental health issues should have opportunities to contribute to decisions that affect their lives.

That sounds reasonable, yet healthcare has not always made room for the voices of the people receiving treatment. Decisions have often been made by professionals and organisations with limited input from those who actually use the services.

Clinical expertise is crucial, but so is understanding what happens when someone tries to put a treatment plan into practice. Is the care accessible? Does the person feel respected? Are their concerns taken seriously? Does the treatment make sense for the life they’re living?

People with lived experience can help answer those questions.

When healthcare professionals listen to the people they’re treating, they gain a fuller understanding of what recovery means. That doesn’t mean that personal stories replace scientific evidence, but it does mean those stories can help professionals use that evidence in ways that help people.

Sharing your story is a choice

World Mental Health Day encourages people to speak openly about mental health, and that’s a good thing. For too long, mental illness and addiction have been surrounded by silence and misunderstanding.

We hear a lot about the importance of sharing our experiences with mental health and addiction, especially during awareness campaigns, and for some people, talking openly about what they’ve been through is an important part of recovery. Not everyone feels that way, though. Some people would rather keep those parts of their lives to themselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Perhaps they’re still trying to make sense of what happened, or maybe they’re worried about how family members, employers or friends will react. Or they simply don’t want their most difficult times in life to become public knowledge. All of those reasons are valid.

Nobody should feel obligated to share painful memories or deeply personal information just because their story might help someone else. And nobody needs to turn their suffering into an inspirational story for other people.

You don’t have to share your own experiences to make a difference. Sometimes it’s enough to listen when someone tells you what they’re going through, without judging them or trying to fix everything. Or maybe it’s speaking up when someone makes an ignorant comment about addiction or mental illness.

For those who do choose to share, it’s important that their stories are heard without judgement or the expectation that every experience must end with a lesson. Sometimes a person just wants to tell the truth about what happened, and that should be enough.

This World Mental Health Day, listen…

Every October, World Mental Health Day brings awareness campaigns and social media posts to check on the people around us. Yes, all of those things have their place, but perhaps we could spend a little more time listening this year.

We tend to have certain ideas about what depression, addiction and recovery are supposed to look like, but then you talk to someone who has actually lived through it, and you realise how much you don’t know. 

Depression isn’t always obvious. Getting sober doesn’t automatically fix everything that led someone to drink in the first place. And what helps one person recover might not do much for someone else. That’s why these conversations matter so much. They remind us that there’s a lot we can learn when we stop assuming we already understand.

People with lived experience don’t have all the answers, and neither do healthcare professionals. When we make room for both clinical knowledge and personal experience, we have a better chance of truly understanding what people need.

At Centres for Health & Healing, we understand that mental health and addiction recovery are personal experiences. Our approach to treatment recognises each person’s individual needs, experiences and goals.

If you or someone you love is having a difficult time with mental health or addiction, you don’t have to figure everything out on your own. Contact us to talk about what you’re going through and explore your options for treatment.

References:

• World Health Organization. (n.d.). World Mental Health Day.
• Mental Health Commission of Canada. (2016). Making the case for peer support.
• World Health Organization. (2023). WHO framework for meaningful engagement of people living with noncommunicable diseases, and mental health and neurological conditions.