Listening before legislating

EVERY World Mental Health Day arrives with a theme, a hashtag, and a flurry of panels. This year’s call to centre the voices of people with lived experience deserves more than a single day. It requires an honest accounting of whose voices have shaped our mental health agenda, and whose have been absent from it. In clinical practice, one learns that people rarely describe their distress in the language of diagnosis. Recent events shape, and at times fortify, age-old dogmas. A young woman laments that recent allegations of sexual assault on a university campus have reinforced the view for her…