Transforming mental health through lived experience: roadmap for integrating lived and living experience practitioners into policy, services and community

Overview

Integrating lived/living experience practitioners into health-care and social systems is crucial to realizing recovery-oriented mental health care. Practitioners model recovery and bridge gaps between traditional health-care structures and service users, humanizing and promoting inclusivity of services. This roadmap, co-created under the WHO Regional Office for Europe’s collaboration with the European Commission under the “Addressing mental health challenges in the European Union, Iceland and Norway” project, provides a structured framework to integrate lived/living experience expertise into mental health systems and workforce through six essential actions. Case studies from a variety of European countries are presented to illustrate these actions in practice. The roadmap is for use by governments, mental health policy-makers, service providers, people who use services, lived/living experience workers and advocates.