The “lived experience community” is framed as a space of solidarity, yet it remains exclusionary. It prioritises those with the time, resources, and security to disclose their struggles; those who can afford to turn their pain into institutional currency. Meanwhile, those most affected by psychiatric violence are too busy trying to survive.
Lived Experience as Institutional Currency
Institutions claim to centre lived experience but treat it as a commodity, valuable only when it aligns with existing power structures. They seek voices that fit their agendas, reducing lived experience to performance. Neat, digestible narratives are welcomed; uncomfortable, unresolved stories are ignored.
Those who critique psychiatry as a tool of state control, racial capitalism, and carceral violence are dismissed as “too radical”, or simply excluded from the conversation altogether. Participation in panels, consultations, and storytelling initiatives requires financial security; an unspoken privilege. The lived experience space remains overwhelmingly white and middle class because those without the luxury of advocacy: those too poor, too racialised, too criminalised, are locked out. The lived experience space, in its current form, does not disrupt power; it repackages it.
The Lived Experience “Community” as a White Space
Despite its claims to inclusivity, the lived experience space is dominated by whiteness. Whiteness dictates whose voices matter, whose suffering is recognised, and whose experiences are amplified. Black and migrant people are disproportionately psychiatrised, policed, forcibly medicated, and institutionalised, yet we rarely, if ever, get to shape the discourse.
For us, “lived experience” cannot be a badge of honour; it can further marginalise us in ways that are engulfing. Masking is not just a social aid but a survival strategy against being further medicalised, criminalised, or institutionalised. Institutions determine whose experiences are legitimate and whose resistance is tolerable.
This exclusion is not about representation, it is about power. As Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe remind us, Black existence is shaped by surveillance, containment, and erasure. Within the lived experience community, this takes the form of gatekeeping and respectability politics. Only those who fit a palatable narrative are granted space. When we name racism, colonial violence, and economic oppression as the root of our suffering, we can be accused of “derailing” the conversation.
Many of us would not have been psychiatrised if not for the trauma of migration, anti-Blackness, and being made into the Other. Our distress is often not a personal pathology but a direct response to displacement, alienation and racial capitalism.
Towards a More Radical Lived Experience Community
A truly transformative lived experience community must reject the idea that representation is enough. We do not need more invitations to white-led tables; we need to build our own spaces, on our own terms, free from institutions that have historically harmed us. This means centring those still navigating psychiatric violence: those who do not speak English; those who are houseless; those without the privilege of turning their pain into advocacy.
It also requires interrogating how psychiatry upholds racial capitalism, state violence, and carceral logics. As Black abolitionists remind us, liberation does not come from reforming oppressive institutions, but rather by dismantling them entirely. A radical lived experience community must be grassroots, built by and for those most impacted; not as case studies or stories to be consumed, but as leaders, thinkers, and organisers in their own right. Without that, it will remain just another industry repackaging oppression as empowerment.
The Limitations of Lived Experience
This blog is part of our “The Limitations of Lived Experience” series which was open for submissions from NSUN members in January 2025 and published from February 2025. All the blogs in the series are available here.