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World Mental Health Day: Listening Must Lead to Change
MEDIA RELEASE
For Immediate Release
10 October 2026
AAMHP calls for lived experience to shape mental-health services and for awareness to translate into accessible care
The Australian Association of Mental Health Practitioners (AAMHP) is marking World Mental Health Day 2026 by calling for people with lived and living experience of mental-health challenges to have a meaningful role in shaping the services, systems and policies intended to support them.
Observed globally on 10 October, this year’s World Health Organization campaign carries the theme “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change.”
WHO says meaningful engagement must extend beyond inviting people to share personal stories. People with lived experience should have opportunities to influence decisions, co-design services, strengthen peer-led approaches and help build mental-health systems that are more responsive, person-centred and rights-based.
AAMHP Chair Shane Warren said the theme challenges the mental-health sector to examine the difference between listening and genuinely sharing influence.
“We have become much better at inviting people to tell us about their lived experience. The harder question is what happens after they have spoken. Were they simply invited to provide a story, or did what they told us actually change the service, policy or decision?” [Shane Warren]
“Listening is important. But listening without action can eventually become another form of exclusion. Lived experience needs to be recognised as knowledge that sits alongside professional expertise, research and clinical understanding.” [Shane Warren]
Awareness is only the beginning
AAMHP says World Mental Health Day should also prompt Australia to look beyond awareness campaigns towards whether people can actually reach appropriate support when they need it.
In 2024–25, around 2.8 million Australians received Medicare-subsidised mental-health services, while public community mental-health services delivered approximately 9.9 million contacts to around 490,000 consumers.
At the same time, Australian public hospital emergency departments recorded around 318,200 mental-health-related presentations in 2024–25, an increase of 15 per cent since 2015–16.
AAMHP Secretary Susan Sandy said awareness is valuable only when people can move from recognising a problem to finding appropriate help.
“We have spent many years encouraging people to speak up, reach out and seek help. We now have to keep asking whether the system they encounter when they do that is understandable, affordable, timely and able to respond to the kind of support they actually need.” [Susan Sandy]
“Not everybody requires the same intervention. Mental-health support may involve specialist clinical care, counselling, peer support, community services, family work or other appropriately qualified practitioners. A strong system needs clear pathways between those options rather than expecting people in distress to work everything out for themselves.” [Susan Sandy]
WHO’s 2026 campaign also emphasises the importance of moving towards community-based, person-centred mental-health care, enabling people to remain connected with family, relationships and community wherever appropriate.
Shane Warren said this requires a broader understanding of what good mental-health care looks like.
“Mental health does not exist only inside hospitals, clinics or diagnostic categories. It exists in families, workplaces, schools, neighbourhoods and communities. Good systems need specialist services when they are required, but they also need accessible support earlier and closer to where people actually live their lives.” [Shane Warren]
AAMHP believes people with lived and living experience should be involved meaningfully in the development of mental-health education, professional standards, service design, workforce planning and policy.
That involvement should also recognise diversity within lived experience.
No individual can speak for every person who has experienced psychological distress, mental illness, suicide-related distress, trauma, disability or contact with mental-health services. WHO similarly emphasises that lived experience takes many forms and that no single voice represents everyone.
Susan Sandy said respectful engagement requires making room for that complexity.
“Lived experience is not one voice or one story. People can experience the same service very differently. Genuine co-design means being prepared to hear experiences that challenge our assumptions as well as those that confirm them.” [Susan Sandy]
On World Mental Health Day 2026, AAMHP encourages governments, services, professional bodies and practitioners to move from hearing people to working with them.
It also renews its call for a mental-health system with multiple, connected pathways into appropriate care, one that recognises professional expertise, community knowledge and lived experience as complementary rather than competing resources.
Awareness starts the conversation. Access determines whether help can be reached. And genuine listening means being prepared to change what happens next.
Media Contact:
Shane Warren, Chair
Susan Sandy, Secretary
Philip Armstrong, CEO
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