Substance Use Disorders and Psychiatric Comorbidity.

Unlike physical health, which protects the principle of informed consent to treatment, specific legislation enables public mental health services to authorise detention, administer treatment without consent, and use restrictive practices. Such legislation operates across inpatient and community settings, invoking human rights issues. Over‐reliance on biomedical approaches to human distress is linked with failure to account for multiple ways people make sense of experience, downplaying the role of social and cultural context and increasing coercion and stigma (World Health Organisation and the United Nations, 2023). As mental health services globally grapple with human rights concerns, and the transformation to recovery‐oriented services, the further growth of a lived experience workforce (LEW) is timely, as our discipline is deeply rooted in human rights as a matter of principle and practice [, ]. The LEW has roots in a socio‐political movement sometimes referred to as the consumer/survivor movement (Beresford & Rose, 2023; Chamberlin, 1990 []; Scholz, 2022). In the 1960s and in common with other oppressed groups, people who had been treated and hospitalised without consent identified a loss of human rights and citizenship. Such movements were rights‐based, committed to social justice, promoted anti‐discrimination and a recognition of connections between political power, structural issues and inequities (Beresford & Rose, 2023 [];). The movement also featured self‐advocacy, highlighting issues of intersectionality, appreciating the impact of social determinants in people's lives, and opposing all forms of coercion (Beresford & Rose, 2023). Such a heritage means a knowledge focused on human rights and an activist stance in practice is intrinsic to LE work []. We use ‘lived experience’ to mean experiences commonly cast as mental ill health and/or using mental health services or not being able to access mental health services when needed.