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Honoured to Receive the 2025 WA Mental Health Award for Lived Experience Impact & Inspiration

  • Writer: Michael Elwan
    Michael Elwan
  • Oct 11, 2025
  • 2 min read

Updated: Nov 9, 2025

Michael Elwan - Award Winner - 2025 WA Mental Health Award - Lived Experience Impact & Inspiration

This week, I was deeply honoured to receive the 2025 WA Mental Health Award for Lived Experience Impact & Inspiration, sponsored by the WA Mental Health Commission.


The award recognises the work I do through Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs) - supporting people and organisations to move from silence to safety, and from stigma to understanding. It celebrates the power of lived experience as both a source of healing and a driver of systemic change.


Through LEXs, I provide culturally-attuned counselling, mentoring, and consultancy for people navigating trauma, grief, migration, identity, and mental health challenges. Many of my clients come from culturally and linguistically diverse and faith-based communities, where traditional services have not always felt safe or accessible. Together, we work in ways that honour culture, family, and spirituality; creating new pathways to recovery that feel human and inclusive.


Beyond counselling, my work extends to advising national and state mental health systems so that policies and services reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.

This award is meaningful because it recognises what I have long believed: that lived experience is not a limitation; it is leadership. When we bring our stories, cultures, and truths into the room, systems change.


To my clients, colleagues, and community - thank you for walking beside me, for your courage, and for reminding me daily why this work matters.


You can read more about the WA Mental Health Awards and the remarkable finalists on the WAAMH website


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.

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Michael Elwan - Award Winner - 2025 WA Mental Health Award - Lived Experience Impact & Inspiration
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Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs)
Where care feels human again

 

Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs) acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters, culture and community. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.

 

At LEXs, lived and living experience sits at the heart of the work. I value the knowledge of individuals, families, carers and kin who navigate mental health challenges, distress and recovery, and whose expertise helps make care more human, compassionate and responsive. I am particularly committed to the wellbeing of multicultural communities, whose experiences are too often overlooked in mainstream mental health systems.

 

LEXs is committed to providing a respectful, inclusive and affirming space for people of all ages, abilities, neurotypes, cultures, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, body sizes and lived experiences.

If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 000. For 24/7 crisis support, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14. LEXs is not an emergency or crisis response service. A list of 24/7 crisis support lines across Australia is available here.

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© 2026 by Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs)

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