A Program for Valuing Mental Health Lived Experience in Social Work Education

ABSTRACT Participation and involvement of service users, carers, and families into the design, delivery, evaluation, and development of mental health policy and services is now a standard expectation. As social workers are employed in mental health settings, it is vital that graduates understand and ethically engage with mental health consumers, survivors, ex-patients, and family (CSX + F) in a meaningful and authentic manner. We argue this extends to fostering critical understandings of dominant discourses about distress, trauma, diagnosis, and intervention as a routine component of social work education. The Valuing Lived Experience Program (VLEP) described in this article within the Curtin University School of Allied Health aims to meaningfully embed the voices of people with lived experience of mental distress, trauma, and service use into the education of tertiary students and academics. Lived experience education in social work is vitally important and requires appropriate resourcing, clear purpose and principles, and attention to the democratisation of knowledge in order to achieve epistemic justice. In this article, the authors describe and contextualise the VLEP as a contemporary example of how lived experience in social work education can occur and be developed. IMPLICATIONS Meaningful participation of people with mental health lived experience is important to social work education. Lived experience education needs to be underpinned by clear ethical and theoretical principles for teaching and learning. Programs that rigorously engage with lived experience in mental health education can make a positive contribution to critical understandings of mental distress.