At NSUN, we are interested in exploring what regularly-used language around mental health and the survivor/service user movement means to those with lived experience of mental ill-health, trauma, and distress.
In the summer of 2024, we opened an anonymous survey sharing a range of terms selected by the NSUN team, asking people with lived experience to define those terms in the context of mental health.
We are bringing those definitions together into this publication. We hope that this resource, acting as a crowdsourced glossary of terms defined by people with lived experience, can be used and referred to by anyone who would find it helpful.
About the glossary
The terms included in this resource are:
Abolition, advocacy, capacity, chronic, coercion, collective, community, criminalisation, co-production, disability, discrimination, distress, grassroots, healthcare, iatrogenic harm, identity, intersectional, injustice, justice, lived experience, lived experience leadership, mad, marginalisation, mental health, power, recovery, restrictive, representation, safeguarding, safety, service user, solidarity, survivor, trauma, user-led, visibility, voice, and vulnerability.
We encourage and challenge those working in mental health service provision, research, and policy work to carefully consider the power of the language that they use and the implications that it may have. This resource may serve as a starting point.
People with lived experience are not one uniform group who all share the same opinions and experiences. We aim to acknowledge and celebrate the plurality of language: many words and terms mean very different things to different people. Within this publication we have included a short summary of the responses we got for each term, as well as a selection of quoted definitions. For some terms, quotations may offer completely different interpretations and reactions to each other.
Alternatively, click here to download the glossary as a Word document
If you’re interested in the language of the mental health lived experience landscape, and would like to read about the ways that NSUN uses language, you can visit our History & Language page.