It’s human nature to simplify. We look for patterns and categories to make sense of what is complex and messy, to bring some kind of order to the chaos of being. In busy, pressured healthcare environments, that pull is stronger still. People are reduced to diagnoses, risks, observations and bed numbers – a shorthand for communicating and coping in systems stretched far beyond their limits. But lean on those labels too heavily and they risk eclipsing the care they were designed to scaffold. It becomes all too easy to see “the suicide attempt”, “the addict”, “the anorexic” or simply “bed 4”, and to lose sight of the aching soul beneath the label: a person with fears and feelings, experiences and stories, and a life far bigger than their illness.

I’ve spent my own time under a label. Pathologised for every word spoken and every thought shared. Separation from illness preached as gospel, yet the opportunity never afforded. It’s not easy to hold onto yourself when you are repeatedly told that you are not you. That your thoughts are not your own, your hopes not yours to hold. When the boundary between you and your illness, and with it your trajectory and your capacity for a future, is defined by people who have known you for a fraction of the time you have known yourself.

An erasure that leaves you doubting your very sense of self, and whether you are even deserving of hope. Hollowed out first by illness, and then by the care system itself. Recovery is a war to be won, yet it is profoundly unjust to expect someone to fight for their life while also fighting to be believed and seen as a person. No one should have to be well to be worthy.

At my most unwell, to be heard, truly heard, was all I wanted. But labels stick, and they silence. They carry assumptions and stereotypes that settle like a cloud over every word, so that what you say is weighed against your diagnosis until the diagnosis is all that’s left to define you. Too often, those who most need to be heard are still in the thick of their own struggle, told they are not unwell enough to need help, or too unwell to have insight.

Lived experience is expertise. Rich and raw, unlike anything a textbook can teach, born on the frontline of struggle and carried through the long, unglamorous work of finding a way through.

This year’s World Mental Health Day theme is “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change”.

Real voices are not always neatly packaged into a story of survival or validated by a string of letters after a name. They may lack the words or be difficult to understand, and may not fit the cookie-cutter mould of care provision that so often fails to see the individual in front of it.

Real change asks for more than a platform. It asks us to listen when our assumptions are challenged, and to sit with the discomfort of perspectives that disrupt ingrained practice and long-held attitudes. Involving people with lived experience at every stage of service design, and resisting the urge to overshadow, dismiss or simplify.

The human experience was never meant to fit a predetermined definition, and it should never be confined to one.