National Survivor User Network

Today, our partner National Survivor User Network, in partnership with Act Build Change, published The Shape of Safety: a guide to reimagining safety and safeguarding alongside young people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress and trauma. This guide resulted from a series of workshops centring on young people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress or trauma, who have been failed by safeguarding systems designed to keep them safe. It was created in collaboration with user-led organisations: Revoke and Voice Collective. Their guide celebrates methods of fostering cultures of safety and care within organisations, offering principles for better practice, key questions, and a practitioner’s checklist to support positive change. Click here to read the guide: https://lnkd.in/eNu7z2t7 #MentalHealth #LivedExperience #Safeguarding

National Survivor User Network, in partnership with Act Build Change, have published The Shape of Safety: a guide to reimagining safety and safeguarding alongside young people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress and trauma. Created in collaboration with user-led young peoples’ organisations Revoke and Voice Collective, this project is the result of a series of workshops centering young people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress or trauma, who have been failed and disempowered by the safeguarding systems designed to keep them safe. Taking a trauma-informed, anti-oppressive approach, the guide shares and celebrates methods of fostering cultures of safety and care within organisations, and centres lived experience and young peoples’ agency in offering principles for better practice, reflective questions and a practitioner’s checklist to support organisational change. Click here to find out more and read the guide: https://lnkd.in/etse2AKM

NSUN, in partnership with Act Build Change, have today published '-The Shape of Safety: a guide to reimagining safety and safeguarding alongside young people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress and trauma. Created in collaboration with user-led young peoples’ organisations Revoke and Voice Collective, this project is the result of a series of workshops centering young people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress or trauma, who have been failed and disempowered by the safeguarding systems designed to keep them safe. Taking a trauma-informed, anti-oppressive approach, the guide shares and celebrates methods of fostering cultures of safety and care within organisations, and centres lived experience and young peoples’ agency in offering principles for better practice, reflective questions and a practitioner’s checklist to support organisational change. Click below to find out more and read the guide. https://lnkd.in/eNu7z2t7

📢We have written to Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, to outline the key areas we think should be a priority for the new Government to improve care for those living with mental ill-health, distress and trauma. Our three key areas of focus are as follows. 1⃣ Prioritise care. Beyond increasing staff and decreasing wait times, the Government must challenge abuse within the mental health system, move away from austerity policies, and resist harmful for-profit "innovations". 2⃣ Ensure healthcare for all. This includes protecting trans people's right to healthcare, resuming the reform of the Mental Health Act, and abandoning welfare reforms proposed by the previous Government which use Disabled people as a scapegoat for failing economic policy. 3⃣ Achieve meaningful co-production. Going beyond ensuring people with lived experience can "have a say" on pre-decided issues, and working with smaller, user-led organisations. Read the letter: https://lnkd.in/e-48Gghu

Applications are now open to become NSUN’s new Policy Manager! Salary: £38,722.85 Hours: 5 days/35 hours per week (applications for 4 days per week are welcomed) Location: home-based from Within the UK Deadline: 9am on Monday 23rd September We are looking for someone with relevant skills to develop and deliver NSUN's policy strategy and policy/campaigns projects. NSUN takes a critical, political and rights-based approach to policy work at, centering social justice, anti-oppression, and the social and material determinants of distress and trauma. We want to work intersectionally, and do not consider ourselves to be a “single-issue” organisation. The Policy Manager will play a key role in creating collaborative spaces with members and partners to build momentum and sustainability for lived-experience led mental health policy and campaigns work. Though we do analyse, respond to, and engage with traditional policy mechanisms such as parliamentary processes and legislative change, our focus is more on building an alternative approach and challenging traditional silos at a time where the external environment is one of hostile and unjust structures, systems, and legislation. https://lnkd.in/ecwuYM7G

With our friends at National Survivor User Network, we explored how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) impacts people in the asylum system. We know that PTSD and similar experiences of mental ill-health can be brought on by numerous complex, intersecting factors. Ultimately, it remains difficult to predict who will be affected by such experiences and how severely. What is abundantly clear, on the other hand, is that people who migrate to the UK face major barriers when attempting to access PTSD treatment. PTSD causes a traumatic memory to become ‘stuck’, so that people experiencing it perceive that the event is still happening and they are in danger. Trauma itself can provoke physiological changes including rewiring the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormones and alterations in how the brain files different pieces of information. This can manifest as ‘hypervigilance’ – the state of constant high alert to potential threats. Some professionals recognise a form of PTSD called Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) which can be caused by recurring or long-term traumatic events. Of course not everyone who experiences trauma will go on to develop PTSD. According to the National Health Service, about 1 in 3 people who experience severe trauma will experience PTSD. Read more: https://buff.ly/3WM7f2h #PTSD #Trauma #Migration #Asylum

✨The language of the mental health lived experience landscape (2024)✨ 📌By National Survivor User Network Here's a bit about this resource 🔵NSUN are interested in exploring what regularly used language in mental health ⚫Means to those with lived experience of mental ill-health, trauma, and distress. 🔵In the summer of 2024, they 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. 📌They've compiled key terms and offered a summary of the meaning attached to them collectively ✨Here are some of them 🌱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. Thanks to NSUN for this great guide! 🙏 ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨ 🔥#LivedExperience #Leadership #MentalHealth #Workplace #Peer #CoProduction 🔔 Follow the Lived Experience Advisory Directory's daily updates here👇 💬 Info@livedexperienceleaders.com 🌱https://lnkd.in/gdXun4D4 ☕Interested in hiring LEAD for Consultancy? We help organisations provide exceptional workplaces and support people with lived experience to thrive within them. Find time to have a coffee with us👇. https://lnkd.in/esiXzRFT

In the summer of 2024, we opened an anonymous survey sharing a range of terms, asking people with lived experience to define those terms in the context of mental health. Today, we published 'The language of the mental health lived experience landscape', a crowdsourced glossary which aims to acknowledge and celebrate the plurality of language. 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. https://lnkd.in/eNXV-krm

The process of migration and experiences of immigration systems can create or exacerbate mental ill-health, distress and #trauma. As part of our Who is Welcome: Disability and Migration campaign, we've partnered with our friends at National Survivor User Network to explore the relationship of trauma, #MentalHealth, race and immigration status in the UK immigration system. Discussions around mental-ill health and trauma for people who have crossed borders are often narrow. The majority of research into mental ill-health for people in the asylum system focuses on trauma before coming to the UK, but doesn’t adequately investigate the trauma caused by borders or the UK asylum and immigration system. These include threats of deportation or detention, immigration raids, inhumane asylum accommodation, right to work checks, sponsorship visas, extension applications, #NRPF or surveillance. Furthermore, mental health services are constructed on the basis of colonial-era White knowledge systems, which continue to inform what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’. This racism is embedded in carceral systems like inpatient psychiatric facilities and immigration detention centres. Racist assumptions that associate racialised groups with the idea of a ‘threat’ are exacerbated when racialised individuals experience mental ill-health. The intersection of mental health stigma – which should be understood as a form of ableism – and racism, including #Islamophobia, manifests in the immigration system and ‘counter-terrorism’ measures. Individualistic, neoliberal approaches to mental-ill health and disability mean that responsibility to be healthy is placed on the individual, while the impact of oppressive structures is obscured. This is where we can learn from #DisabilityJustice frameworks and psych abolition movements in our struggle. An abolitionist approach to society focused on community strength and support can tackle the punitive, isolating and individualistic logic that underpins mental healthcare as we know it. Mental health services do not have to be sites of punishment and incarceration. As the Campaign for Psych Abolition says: "Mentally ill people deserve respect, autonomy, compassion, and community care. We believe in non-punitive, patient-centred treatment, absent of the current harmful, traumatising psychiatric ‘solutions’ that are forced upon us. Mental illness will always exist but will be greatly reduced by tackling the systemic oppression that causes and exacerbates poor mental health." Read the piece: https://buff.ly/3WM7f2h #BorderAbolition #PsychAbolition #Disability

The RRN were pleased to coproduced a new 'Supporting Menstruation' resource with Hat Porter. The resource explains Hat's research into experiences of menstrual health within psychiatric inpatient settings with a restrictive practice focus. You can view and download the resource here https://bit.ly/RRNSMH The research was was commissioned by National Survivor User Network You can read the research report and guidelines for services and access an Easy Read summary on the NSUN website here https://lnkd.in/ecK5hTWx #BlanketRestrictions #Healthcare #HumanRights #ReducingRestrictivePractices