Lived experience leadership crucial to human rights and mental healthThe TheMHS Conference this week on ‘Bringing humanity and human rights into mental health’ provided an opportune time to reflect on where we’ve come from, and where we’re going in relation to human rights, mental health and lived experience. It will be 30 years this October since the release of the Burdekin Report, which at its core resulted in some major changes to mental health policy in Australia including a move towards deinstitutionalisation. Re-reading the speech delivered by Brian Burdekin in October 1993 to release the report, there are many issues that are still relevant today, and still in need of advocacy and action. Most simply, Burdekin reported that: “International instruments incorporated in federal law stipulate that individuals affected by mental illness are entitled, without discrimination, to the same range of human rights as everybody else.” Eight years after the Burdekin Report, Mental Health Australia partnered with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission to develop 'Not for service' an instrumental report which also highlighted the rise of lived experience advocacy in the future of policy design and service delivery. At the time, Human Rights Commissioner and Acting Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Sev Ozdowski said: “It was our view that governments needed to hear how Australia’s mental health consumers and professionals felt about the system that they were dealing with. Some of the stories we heard demonstrated the incredible strength of the human spirit and perseverance of mental health professionals doing the best they possibly could in the circumstances. However, it must be said that the vast majority of stories described a crumbling mental health care system that brought about anguish and desperation.” When the Productivity Commission Inquiry into Mental Health was released in 2020, the issue of human rights was again highlighted, with sadly little improvement. In fact, in the words of the PC Commission itself, human rights complaints were ‘increasing markedly’. “The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of disability (including mental illness) in areas such as education, employment, the provision of goods and services and access to public buildings. Nevertheless, hundreds of complaints by people with mental illness are made to the Australian Human Rights Commission each year, with the number of complaints increasing markedly over recent years.” So where are we now following the Burdekin Report, ‘Not for Service’, the PC and many more reports and inquiries? The answer from the keynote speaker at TheMHS – Dainius Pūras – is that a rights based approach to mental health care is now recognised as best practice internationally. A former Special Rapporteur with the United Nations, Mr Puras is a human rights advocate who has been involved in the process of transforming public health policies and services for 30 years. His special focus is the rights of children, persons with mental ill-health, and other groups in vulnerable situations. He highlighted some of the global obstacles to embedding a human rights approach, which include the dominance of a biomedical model, and power asymmetries. The speech was a timely reminder that we still have much more work to do when it comes to human rights and mental illness in Australia. The importance of establishing a human rights framework, which has been missing from our national legislation, cannot be overlooked if we are to move the dial. We commend the recent work of the National Mental Health Consumer Carer Forum and their Submission to the Inquiry into Australia's Human Rights Framework by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. In parallel to this human rights framework, the Government’s recent commitment to develop a new Consumer Peak Body, and a new Carers, Families and Kin Peak Body, will provide an important step forward in recognising and embedding lived experience leadership into the mental health system, and overcoming some of the barriers to adopting a human rights approach in mental health. At Mental Health Australia, we believe that establishing these new peak bodies as independent organisations – rather than through auspicing, consortia or partnership arrangements – will be critical, to genuinely embed lived experience leadership into our system, and with it, a strong human rights approach to mental health. These developments are important pieces in the generational efforts to bring humanity to the issue of human rights and mental health. Have a good weekend. Carolyn Nikoloski CEO, Mental Health Australia |