ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a multiple methods research project on sharing personal mental health lived experience, undertaken in 2013 in a UK statutory mental health trust and a similar organisation in Australia. By 2013, mental health NHS trusts nationally were embarking on a new way of working, following in the footsteps of many third sector organisations employing peer support and recovery workers. These roles were seen as pivotal to people who were recovering from, or indeed experiencing, a mental health crisis. The sharing lived experience is used interchangeably with, and analogous to, extra-therapy disclosures about practitioners' personal experiences, in particular those of having experienced mental illness themselves. In the systematic review, 15 empirical and 13 non-empirical articles were identified that made a significant or substantial mention of mental health self-disclosure by practitioners in mental health settings.
