Mental Health Awareness Week 2020 – Our theme: Lived Experience

For Mental Health Awareness Week 2020 at Together we have chosen the theme of lived experience. For the week we will be focusing on the value of the knowledge people gain from their experiences and how important that is for us in our approach to supporting people experiencing mental distress.

Our core principle at Together is service user leadership through which people are empowered to make choices that affect their lives and lead their journey to wellbeing on their own terms. Each person’s knowledge of their lived experience of mental distress is unique. We believe that by helping them to share that we can ensure the support we provide is fully informed and guided by them.

For Mental Health Awareness week we want to highlight the ways people’s knowledge of lived experience of mental distress provides insight and perspective that is incredibly valuable. That could be a person using our services who feels able to share their personal knowledge that helps us assess the best way to support them. It could be our peer support workers who apply their own knowledge and experiences each day while working alongside others. Or it could be through our National Service User Steering Group who advise on our strategic and operational decisions.

We want to use the week to celebrate the benefits that come from utilising the knowledge gained from lived experience. That will be in solidarity with others who may be experiencing distress and we aim to provide perspective and increase awareness by acknowledging that all of our experiences are different and we can always learn from them.

View our definitions of service user leadership and lived experience