OCT 10 marked the annual World Mental Health Day.
This year’s theme, “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change”, emphasises listening to people who have personally experienced mental health challenges and ensuring their voices shape how policies, services, and systems are designed in this area. It recognises that people with lived experience have firsthand knowledge and insights about mental health conditions and service systems that are invaluable to professionals, policymakers, and the wider community.
Post-Covid Malaysia
This year’s theme is particularly relevant for Malaysia’s mental health landscape in the post-pandemic era. Six years later, Covid-19 can be seen not only as a period of crisis but also as a transformative moment for mental health awareness in Malaysia, accelerating public conversations about mental wellbeing, expanding online mental health services, and encouraging more Malay-sians to seek help when it is needed.
The pandemic catalysed the growth of Malaysia’s mental health sector, with new providers and services rising to the occasion for better mental health awareness and accessibility.
Most importantly, it created space for more open conversations about mental health across society.
At this juncture, this year’s theme serves as an important reminder that these gains must translate into meaningful participation, ensuring that the people mental health services are intended to serve are genuinely heard and actively involved in shaping them.
Keeping it real
The next stage of mental health development in Malaysia calls for more specialised, targeted, and responsive care tailored to specific client populations. Delivering this will require closer engagement with people who have lived experience, as their insights can help us better understand the realities, barriers, and needs faced by these communities. Equally important, their shared lived experiences can help build trust and confidence with the very communities we seek to support. People with lived experience can play a particularly vital role within a stepped-care model, providing support through peer networks, community initiatives, and low-intensity interventions.
Drawing on their own experiences, peer support workers can offer empathy, help navigate mental health services, and encourage help-seeking before challenges escalate. Their lived experience serves as living proof that recovery is indeed possible, demonstrating how hope, resilience, and healing can be shared in a community.
Hearing the unheard
Perhaps the most important contribution people with lived experience can make is giving voice to underserved communities within the client population. Having personally navigated mental health challenges and service systems, they understand both individual and institutional barriers to care.
This calls for greater opportunities and platforms to engage people with lived experience, ensuring that often unheard voices contribute to decision-making by government agencies and mental health providers.
People with lived experience can help ensure that policies, services, and models of care remain effective for underserved communities. Mental health training and professional pathways for people with lived experience would enable them to enter the mental health workforce. As the sector becomes more diverse and specialised, providers that integrate lived experience into professional practice may gain an advantage in delivering more responsive and needs-based care.
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Valuable expertise
As we observe World Mental Health Day and month, we must recognise lived experience as a valuable form of expertise that can drive meaningful and impactful change in mental health care. The mental health sector stands to benefit from proactive steps to harness lived-experience knowledge and insights in shaping policies and services that better respond to the needs of the communities we serve. This will require us not only to hear people with lived experience, but also to act on their expertise to improve service delivery.
Malaysia has made significant progress in advancing mental health care since the pandemic, yet much more remains to be done to meet growing community needs.
People with lived experience are changemakers, not only in their own lives but also in improving access to care, reducing stigma and strengthening support for others. Their voices remind us of the very raison d’être of mental health systems and recognising their expertise is key to achieving the real change this year’s theme envisions.
Dr Arman I. Rashid is a Kuala Lumpur-born, Melbourne-based mental health professional, advocate and trainer. The views expressed here are solely of the writer’s own.
