Audio and Visual Resources

Below you will find a number of visual and audio resources

What Will It Take For Peers To Have An Equal Voice In Key Decision Making?

Dr Louise Byrne reflects on 20 years working in designated Lived Experience/Peer roles and the challenges we still face working towards change within a system that continues to discredit and discount our collective expertise.

The keynote includes:

  • Remaining barriers, particularly due to the Lived Experience literacy, acceptance and attitudes of other professions, funders and government agencies
  • The need for people with disparate peer perspectives to seek and find points in common
  • Using our combined voices and unified messaging to advocate collectively and effectively
  • Challenging ongoing priority of more established, ‘formalised’ knowledge and promoting our lived and living, experiential knowing as valid and necessary to systems transformation
  • Advocating for more opportunities to come together formally and informally to define and refine our knowledge base, and ultimately increase the authority and impact we have within service systems.

Yes, there is a song at the end and it is rousing.

Mental Health But Not As You Know It

Louise works from the perspective of her own experience of significant mental health challenges, service use, and periods of healing. 

Dr Louise Byrne has utilised her lived experience knowledge in a variety of roles in government, non-government and tertiary settings since 2005, including a role as an expert advisor to the Queensland Mental Health Commission and as Australia’s first full-time Lived Experience Mental Health academic at CQUniversity.

Helping People Cope with Mental Illness Stigma: 'Believe in Them'

Lived experience practitioner Louise Byrne tells the Q&A audience how to help someone facing stigma associated with mental illness.

Q&A Highlight - Makes Me Feel Other

Dr Louise Byrne tells of the stigma she faces in disclosing that she has had significant mental health challenges and the fear people have in discussing these issues.

Lived Experience Mental Health

Louise Byrne is using her personal experience of severe mental illness to teach mental health nurses about the benefits of peer support. Informed by their own lived experience , peer support workers help patients navigate the mental health system and offer care and friendship on the road to recovery.

Duration: 9min 34sec

TheMHS Conference 2019 - Keynote Louise Byrne

Keynote presentation by Louise Byrne at TheMHS Conference 2019
“If we value lived experience, why is disclosure still fraught, and what can we do about it?”