Featured by Suicide Prevention Australia: Michael Elwan on Lived Experience and Systems Change

This week, I had the honour of being featured by Suicide Prevention Australia in a national video spotlighting members of the National Lived and Living Experience Panel. It’s a short but powerful reflection piece, asking each of us: What are your hopes for the upcoming National Suicide Prevention Conference?

It’s more than just a video. It’s a reminder that voices like ours - those who carry the pain, the memory, and the insight of lived experience - are not just being heard. We are being trusted.

As someone who lost my mother to suicide, whose grief was compounded by cultural silence and systemic failure, the act of speaking openly is never just a professional task. It’s personal. My voice carries a lineage of pain and advocacy, a story that began in in Egypt, where a boy became a carer far too young. That boy is now a man - a father, a social worker, a national advisor - still carrying the weight of that story, but now using it to shape systems.

This Suicide Prevention Australia lived experience feature captures that evolution; from personal tragedy to systems transformation. In the video, you’ll hear from each of us - people from diverse communities, different walks of life, and varied relationships with suicide. What unites us is not the specific details of our journeys, but a shared belief: that lived and living experience should not be sidelined as emotional testimony, but centred as strategic wisdom.

For me, this upcoming conference is a chance to shift the national narrative from tokenism to transformation. I’ll be there presenting on building intergenerational dialogue in CaLD families, and also standing in quiet solidarity with everyone who has walked the long road from heartbreak to healing. I want our sector to understand that when we create genuine cultural safety, we unlock not just participation - but leadership.

Because it is not enough to invite lived experience into rooms designed without us. We must redesign the rooms.

To every policymaker, clinician, and service leader attending this year’s conference: I ask you to listen with your whole self. Not just with your head, but with your heart. Let the insights shared by those of us with lived experience inform your strategies, budgets, and workplace cultures. Let them provoke your thinking, shift your assumptions, and deepen your commitment to authentic partnership.

This isn’t about sentiment. It’s about systems change.

To my peers and colleagues on the panel: thank you for your courage. For showing up. For sharing truths that are often hard-won and hard to hold. For standing beside me - not in competition, but in collective wisdom.

You can watch the video here.

And if you're someone working in the mental health space - whether in service design, research, policy, or community work - I invite you to reflect on this question: What would your organisation look like if it were led by lived experience? Not just informed by it. Not just advised by it. But led.

Because healing begins when we stop speaking for people, and start creating space with them.

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 page.