Sharing lived experience should never be a tick box.

Lived experience should never be a tick box. And it is much more than telling our stories.

Tomorrow is World Mental Health Day. I've been reflecting on what lived experience can contribute.

Eighteen years ago, I had a flourishing career in branding and marketing. Then I experienced a mental breakdown, and the life I knew changed completely.

After hospital admissions, I walked into Mind and asked how I could help. Through their social enterprise team, I shared my lived experience with police, paramedics, teachers and organisations, along with mental health nursing students at a local university.

I wanted to do more. I wrote articles, contributed to magazines, became a BEAT Ambassador and called another university to ask if I could speak to their students.

That grew into keynote talks, Insight Days, workshops and work on nursing and paramedic courses across the country. I helped shape sessions, learning outcomes and simulations, encouraging future professionals to think critically about care.

What drove me wasn't only the good care I'd experienced. It was the times I had no voice, when I was judged for how unwell I was and when people didn't understand the challenges of serious mental illness.

I wasn't planning a business. I knew there were things I wanted future healthcare professionals to understand that couldn't always be learnt from a textbook.

Today, that work continues through Lived Experience Inspires and my role as an Associate Consultant with the Royal College of Nursing.

But my lived experience isn't simply what happened to me. It's also what I've learnt from living with mental illness for over 25 years: what helps, what doesn't, what good care looks like, what happens when systems fail, and how I've found ways to rebuild and live well.

It has also given me the confidence to challenge decisions within systems that can feel much more powerful than the person experiencing them, because changing something might make it better for whoever comes next.

That's why lived experience involvement must be more than a tick box. It isn't inviting somebody onto a panel for a patient voice, asking them to share a difficult experience and carrying on exactly as before. Their voice must influence what happens next.

Across mental health, people are using experiences of illness, distress, trauma, caring and recovery to influence services, challenge policy, educate professionals and improve workplaces. That expertise belongs alongside research, clinical knowledge and professional experience.

For me, this is more than a job. It feels like a vocation. I've lived through incredibly difficult experiences, many times over, and learnt how to use what came from them to help create change for somebody else.

This World Mental Health Day, I hope we move beyond simply giving lived experience a voice. Are we prepared to listen, learn and let it influence what we do?

Fliss

Fliss Hoyle is the founder of Lived Experience Inspires, delivering practical, lived experience-led education through talks, workshops and consultancy. Her work helps workplaces, healthcare organisations and education providers better understand mental health, wellbeing and capacity, moving beyond awareness towards practical action.

If you'd like to find out more about working with Fliss or bringing lived experience into your organisation or event, please get in touch.