Lived Experience Forum

[NikNik]

The Mental Illness Fellowship of Australia (MIFA) plans to strengthen advocacy by people with lived experience of mental illness, by training people to become advocates in their community. The action is planned to coincide in part with Schizophrenia Awareness Week and World Mental Health Day. The aim will be to arm up to 100 trained advocates with messages representative of the lived experience population, to give to key policy makers.
 
To ensure the views and issues are representative of people with lived experience, tonight we want to work with you, to ensure we’re on track.

We want to be clear that we are very keen to hear everyone’s thoughts and ideas, however, not all will be able to be incorporated into the campaign. Further consultation will be taking place, with common themes influencing the final outcome.

Please join myself and Executive Director of MIFA David Meldrum to discuss these priorities and have your opinions heard.

See you at 7pm AEDT

Please hit 'like' if we'll see you here tonight!

[DavidMIFA]

Thanks Nicole. Tonight is part of a project we are runing across Australia to assist people with lived experience of mental illness to take their issues directly to public policy-makers. These SANE forums are a great opportunity to test our thinking about the key topics that consumers and carers would want to lobby about if they had access to politicians.  

[NikNik]

Thanks David!

To set some expectations around tonight - I will asking some pre-defined questions, which is open to anyone to respond to.

I know many of us here are passionate about matters that impact people affected by mental health difficulties and we all have strong views. Everyone's view is valid. In order to get the most of out the night however, we are unable to go into depth about each issue.

So I may encourage people who get a bit passionate about a topic to move on  - that is just so we can ensure we get through everything and you can give us the feedback that is most relevant to this project.

So lets start!

There have been 5 priorities identified as matters that need to be heard by policy makers. They are (in no specific order):

Access to services

Loneliness

physical health

suicide prevention and support

education for carers

Our first question is; from 1 - 5 what order would you priorities these?

[kenny66]

1. Access to services and support which will deal with:

2. Suicide prevention

3.Loneliness

4. Physical health

5. Education for carers

[Eagle]

This is great that we can use the Forums to give feedback on such an important topic and have a say.

I would prioritise them as:

1) Access to services

2) suicide prevention and support

3) Loneliness

4) education for carers

5) physical health

[NikNik]

Thanks @kenny66 and @Eagle 

I will post the next questions in about 5 mins - and give others an opportunity to respond.

🙂

[kenny66]

I should mention that access to services in regional far North Queensland where I live are very sparce indeed. I guess this would be true for m,ost of the regions

[Ellie]

1) suicide prevention and support

2) Access to services

3)  education for carers

4) Loneliness

5) physical health

I might also add that actually having a service, especially in rural areas would be a very good start.

[kenny66]

Does access to services include disability employment providers?

[NikNik]

@kenny66 'Services'  includes 'clinical and community supports' So broadly, yes.

But it's an interesting issue within that.