What Is "Lived Experience," and Why Do We Build Our Work Around It?
Updated: Oct 12
At The Human Aspect (THA), we capture, produce and share personal stories through in depth video interviews: people’s toughest challenge(s), how they coped, and the lessons they’ve carried forward. Our vision is to elevate these real human stories, creating space for connection, richer conversations and wider perspectives. Our goal is to increase mental health literacy, which means reducing stigma, increasing psychosocial knowledge and promoting help seeking behaviour (Jorum, 2000).
At the centre of everything we do is a concept called Lived Experience (LE).
Andrea Bujor
Master's in Psychology & Neuroscience of Mental Health
Marina Chrisikopoulou
Head of Research at The Human Aspect
Annelin Festervoll
Lived Experience Researcher and Advocate
This World Mental Health Day, the World Health Organisation’s 2026 theme calls on the field to meaningfully engage people with lived experience (PWLE) of mental health conditions, and to recognise their knowledge as a vital form of expertise.
Before explaining why we work with lived experience and why this is at the core of World Mental Health Day this year, it’s worth explaining what we mean by the term itself.
What is Lived Experience?
In lay language, lived experience refers to a person’s experiences and the knowledge they gained from it (WHO, 2023).
In mental health systems, lived experience is the personal, first-hand experience of mental health challenges and/or psychological distress, that may or may not have led to encounters with mental health services (WHO, 2025). It includes the meaning attributed to the experience by the person that encountered it.
Closely related to this is experiential knowledge, which is the insight and understanding a person draws from that experience over time (Borkman, 1976). It is a way of knowing about and understanding events through direct engagement, and can shape how a person approaches similar situations in the future.
At The Human Aspect we've built the largest online life experience library over the past 10 years, with over 750 published life stories. We have named these videos "digital lived experiences" (DLE). The library is easily accessible and available for free on our website.
Each interview is with a person sharing their life's greatest challenge, their reflections on resilience, coping strategies, and the lessons they've learned.
The videos are published through the library first and foremost as a self-help resource, or resources for next of kin and loved ones. They are also used to prompt reflections around mental health at schools, universities, health facilities, workplaces or in organisations.
Challenges and Hope of Lived Experience
Lived experience matters, which is reflected through both this year's World Mental Health Day theme and the rapidly growing body of literature on the topic. However, it does not come without its challenges.
A common critique of lived experience engagement is its subjective and broad nature (Dings & Tekin, 2022). Arguments include that experiences are often shaped both by person-related factors and broader structural factors, such as an individual’s socioeconomic status or social marginalised status (Samra, 2025). This misalignment and subjectivity comes from the difference in narratives people attribute to their experiences, and the concern is how to create a form of expertise from that.
Building upon the work of others in the mental health field, THA believes that this dissensus and differences in meaning-making among people can drive innovation (Speyer & Ustrup, 2025). With the diversity of backgrounds and challenges faced by our interviewees, we believe there’s potential to challenge stigma and assumptions about mental health for our viewers. In this way, we seek to challenge the narrative that mental health challenges are something distant to the human experience.
We believe that no single story can capture everything it means to live with mental health challenges, but a library of many can offer rich information that has something for anyone.
Viewers can search the library and find a story that resonates with them, and because people change over time, the stories they connect with may change too. If one story doesn’t reflect someone’s own experience, perhaps another one in the library can. This range can also give people the opportunity to reflect on their own views on mental health.
How do people’s experiences become valuable to others?
The digital lived experience format of our life story library mitigates some of the ethical challenges that typically come with sharing lived experience. Each story is recorded by us, in a safe and supported environment, as opposed to individuals being put on a stage without any institutional support.
The digital format similarly creates an opportunity for group-based reflection, rather than passive lecturing. Instead of information being presented through one-way communication, viewers engage through reflection prompts developed in collaboration with our in-house psychology team. Through reflection evenings, we turn individual viewing into shared, group-based discussion.
Structured reflection is recognised in experiential learning as the step that turns an experience into personal insight (Gummelt et al., 2024). For the person sharing their story, lived experience becomes experiential knowledge, as insight is drawn from something they actually lived through. For our viewers, reflecting on someone else’s story works differently, depending on how it relates to their own life. Those who have lived something similar may recognise their own experience in the story, which can prompt them to reflect on what they have lived and learned themselves. For those who haven’t lived it, they can gain a deeper understanding of a mental health challenge than information alone could offer. This anchors learning in real-life human experiences, bridging the gap between theory and first-person reality.
Additionally, hearing somebody else’s story creates a kind of social contact between the viewer and the person sharing their experience (Thornicroft et al., 2016). Social contact with people with mental health conditions is one of the most effective ways to reduce stigma, including through digital formats such as video.
Evidence also suggests that active engagement with these stories, rather than passive viewing, is more effective for reducing stigma (Thornicroft et al., 2022). This is what our structured reflection is designed to support.
We have built our library around the idea that mental health can be best understood when we listen and interact with the lived realities of those who have lived through it. Hearing others stories can help us look beyond the labels and see the human aspect in all of us.
How our Life Experience Library is Used
The digital lived experience format prompts reflections on how we may responsibly translate personal lived experiences into meaningful educational and practical impact, serving the interests of both the interviewees and the viewers.
How is this done in practice?
First, each person featured in our library owns their story. Once an interview is produced, the interviewee receives a private link to review it and give feedback, and it is only published once they have approved it. They can withdraw their interview from our library at any time. All interviewees sign a consent form, and we follow strict GDPR rules. We also have a designated role at THA that checks in with interviewees to provide support throughout the process.
On the other side, the library can be used by a variety of people. Mental health professionals can use interviews to guide work with their clients. We’ve built this into our Supporters Platform, a tool where mental health professionals can find interviews, alongside “psychological descriptions” written by our psychology team. Each description outlines the interviewee’s challenge and coping strategies, which clients to use it with, how to structure a session around it, and the evidence base for doing so. Professionals can also create reflection pages with suggested reflection questions, to help clients engage with the interview and reflect more deeply.
Educators can use our library to integrate lived experience into coursework and build mental health literacy with students. THA has over the last 6 years created a platform for teachers and youth aged 13-16 and 16-19 in Norway, as part of folkehelse og livsmestring (“public health and life mastery” in English). Here, teachers can find lesson plans for teaching life skills, built around selected videos from our library. Lesson plans are aligned with the curriculum goals of each subject, one or more of the goals of ‘livsmestring,’ and the mental health literacy framework.
Across these environments, an interview can function as a stimulus, whether that be a conversation, a therapeutic session, or a starting point for reflection.
World Mental Health Day 2026 Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change
This year’s WHO’s 2026 campaign, Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change, calls for people with lived experience to be meaningfully engaged and for their knowledge to shape the decisions that affect them.
Two parts of the WHO’s campaign are represented in our work.
Expertise | Stigma |
 Our library is built on the idea that people who have experienced a mental health condition and/or life challenge have an important perspective and understanding that professional training or research alone may not encompass. |  Our library provides exposure to real-life stories and opportunities for connection to the person experiencing the challenge. In this way we continue to support a change of the narrative surrounding mental health. |
This campaign is also a useful prompt for us as an organisation to reflect on where we could develop. There are areas where we could go further in meaningfully engaging people with lived experience and drawing on their expertise.
Future improvements could involve giving people with lived experience a larger voice in how our library gets shaped, used and built upon. For example, we could ask interviewees what they'd want a viewer to sit with after hearing their story, and use that to inform the reflection questions used in our library. This would further leverage the expertise and unique insight a person with lived experience possesses. For supporting materials such as infographics and descriptions of mental health challenges, the interviewee and other people with relevant lived experience could collaborate on content to ensure that language does not feel stigmatising.
In our work with the Supporters platform, we could create a clearer, more structured way for people with lived experience to give feedback on how well the tool holds up in a therapeutic setting. Right now, this work draws on insights from ‘experts for’ (mental health professionals) rather than ‘experts by’ (PWLE).
Our work sits closely to the lived experience movement and we share its values. This year’s World Mental Health Day theme is a useful prompt for us to reflect on where we could incorporate more diverse perspectives and experiences within our organisation.
We see our library, and the environments it’s been used in, as one contribution toward these goals. It is built as a tool to help move the conversation from listening towards action. At the same time, there’s opportunities to do more work on how we involve the people whose stories made our library possible. That work is what this campaign, and World Mental Health Day asks us to reflect on further.
If this resonates with your work, we would like to hear from you about lived experience and building work and/or research around it. Reach out to Marina Chrisikopoulou, Head of Research, at marina@thehumanaspect.com.
About the Authors
This article was written by Andrea Bujor and Marina Chrisikopoulou at THA and Annelin Festervoll. Annelin Festervoll is a lived experience researcher and advocate based in Oslo with over ten years' experience with lived experience work in mental health research. She is currently leading the development of an international declaration for lived experience in youth mental health and is the editor of an edited volume on lived experience in mental health research.
References
Borkman, T. (1976). Experiential knowledge: A new concept for the analysis of self-help groups. Social service review, 50(3), 445-456.
Gummelt, G., Wright, L., Malick, S., Singh, M., & Roebuck, K. (2025). Experiential learning in mental health diversion: interdisciplinary approaches using Kolb’s learning theory. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work, 22(2), 171-188.
Jorm AF. Mental health literacy: Public knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders. British Journal of Psychiatry. 2000;177(5):396-401. doi:10.1192/bjp.177.5.396
WHO framework for meaningful engagement of people living with noncommunicable diseases, and mental health and neurological conditions. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2023. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.
Samra, R. (2025). Conceptualising lived experience in mental health research: problems, insights and implications. Sociology of Health & Illness, 47(4), e70039.
Transforming mental health through lived experience: roadmap for integrating lived and living experience practitioners into policy, services and community. Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe; 2025. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.
Thornicroft, G., Sunkel, C., Aliev, A. A., Baker, S., Brohan, E., El Chammay, R., ... & Winkler, P. (2022). The Lancet Commission on ending stigma and discrimination in mental health. The Lancet, 400(10361), 1438-1480.
Thornicroft, G., Mehta, N., Clement, S., Evans-Lacko, S., Doherty, M., Rose, D., ... & Henderson, C. (2016). Evidence for effective interventions to reduce mental-health-related stigma and discrimination. The Lancet, 387(10023), 1123-1132.