Lived experience leadership: Why language matters on the mental health frontlines

I’ve just published a new piece as part of my role as Writer-in-Residence with the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation. The essay is titled Working the Frontlines, and it sits within a broader series exploring migration, masculinity, caregiving, and how mental health systems are experienced from the inside.

This piece begins in a team meeting.

Not a dramatic moment. No crisis. Just a room, a whiteboard, a file, and a set of words that moved efficiently across the table. What struck me was the quiet gap between the language being used and the lives it was meant to describe.

That gap matters.

In Working the Frontlines, I reflect on what it means to work inside mental health systems you once needed yourself. I write about night shifts, handovers, and the subtle ways people’s stories are compressed into terms that travel well through organisations but poorly through human relationships. I explore how silence can be misread, how cultural context is flattened, and how lived experience is welcomed until it becomes inconvenient.

This is not a critique written from the outside. It is an account shaped by proximity.

For people working in mental health, social work, peer roles, policy, or service design, this piece speaks to something many recognise but rarely have space to name: the moral tension of caring within systems that value efficiency, containment, and risk management, often at the cost of texture and meaning.

For readers with lived or living experience, particularly from multicultural backgrounds, the essay reflects on how systems can feel both supportive and distancing at the same time. How being “assessed” can arrive before being understood. How strength is often assumed where endurance is actually being performed.

This is where lived experience leadership becomes more than a role or a title. It becomes a way of paying attention to language, power, and what gets lost between policy and practice.

You can read the full piece, Working the Frontlines, on the ALIVE National Centre’s digital translation platform here: https://alivenetwork.com.au/where-stories-disappear/

I hope it resonates, unsettles in useful ways, and opens conversations that are often postponed in busy systems.

Based in Perth, WA, LEXs provides telehealth counselling across Australia for individuals, couples, and NDIS participants. Services extend to Social Work supervision, Peer Work supervision, training, and keynote speaking on men’s mental health, CaLD community wellbeing, and culturally responsive suicide prevention; helping people and organisations make mental-health care more compassionate, inclusive, and effective. LEXs provides services across Australia, supporting clients in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and beyond. To learn more about our work across Australia, visit LEXs' services