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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

Lived Experience Expertise for Global Mental Health

Lived experience expertise for global mental health

Meaningful involvement of people with lived experience in clinical practice, research, and policy is essential not only for legitimacy but also for protecting rights, yet formal collaboration remains uncommon.

The presentation discusses how the meaningful involvement of people with lived experience is a critical component of effective and relevant mental health care, research, and policy, while formal collaboration remains far from universal. According to the World Health Organization's 2020 Mental Health Atlas, only 35% of participating countries reported an ongoing formal partnership with service user organizations or organizations representing families and carers. This gap is also evident in legislation itself: many national mental health and legal capacity laws retain provisions such as substitute decision-making and guardianship arrangements that have been identified as discriminatory and fail to reflect practical realities and the safeguards that people with lived experience have long called for. The presentation explains why integrating lived experience expertise into clinical practice, research, and policy is necessary not only for legitimacy but also for protecting rights, drawing on frameworks such as the obligation under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to consult persons with disabilities and actively involve them in decisions that affect them. It then outlines principles for meaningful involvement in the form of practical requirements and concrete guidance: co-production rather than consultation, involvement at the governance level, adequate remuneration, and recognition of diversity within communities of people with lived experience.

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