Australian Mental Health Consumer Movement

Australia’s most comprehensive mental health inquiry, receiving over 12,500 contributions — many from people with lived experience. Its 65 recommendations, delivered March 2021, set a national benchmark for rights-based, consumer-informed reform, including a dedicated mental health levy ensuring sustained funding. The Victorian Government committed to implementing every recommendation, influencing mental health reform debates nationally.

Read More: https://www.vic.gov.au/royal-commission-victorias-mental-health-system-final-report

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lived Experience Centre (within the Black Dog Institute) established Australia’s first national network of First Nations people with lived experience of mental health challenges and suicide. Formalised through national gatherings in 2021, the network connects voices across the country to inform co-design, research, policy, and culturally safe service delivery, ensuring First Nations lived experience is embedded in mental health and suicide prevention systems.

Developed through collaboration between the National Mental Health Consumer and Carer Forum (NMHCCF) and the National PHN Mental Health Lived Experience Engagement Network (MHLEEN), the Lived Experience Leadership Digital Library is a national, co-designed resource that brings together knowledge, research, frameworks, and initiatives related to lived experience leadership. Launched in 2023, it provides an accessible platform to support leadership development, co-design, workforce growth, and system reform, while also preserving and amplifying the contributions of the consumer movement.

Read more: https://livedexperiencedigitallibrary.org.au/

From 2022, Australian Government funding supported the growth of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lived experience initiatives, including the development of Local Lived Experience Networks (LLENs) through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lived Experience Centre. These grassroots, community-led networks enable First Nations people with lived experience of mental health challenges and suicide to connect, contribute to co-design, and advocate for culturally appropriate, locally responsive services across Australia.

In January 2023, the Australian Government committed $7.5 million to establish two independent national mental health peak bodies: one representing people with lived experience of mental health challenges (consumers), and one representing carers, families and kin.

This historic reform aimed to embed lived experience leadership in national policy and decision making, fulfilling long-standing recommendations from major inquiries and decades of consumer and carer advocacy. The initiative laid the foundation for the National Mental Health Consumer Alliance and a parallel national carer peak, Mental Health Carers Australia.

Read more: https://consultations.health.gov.au/mental-health-access-branch/nationalmentalhealthlivedexperiencecarerpeak/

The 2023 Independent Review of the NDIS proposed a major redesign of Australia’s disability support system, including the introduction of “Foundational Supports”—a new tier of services available to all people with disability, regardless of NDIS eligibility. Intended to address longstanding gaps outside the NDIS, these supports include both general and targeted services such as peer support, capacity-building, and community-based psychosocial supports. The reform aims to create a more connected and equitable system that better meets the needs of people who had previously been left without adequate support.

Read More: https://www.families.qld.gov.au/our-work/disability-services/national-disability-insurance-scheme/inquiries-reviews/independent-review-national-disability-insurance-scheme-ndis-review

Authored entirely by people with lived expertise by Mental Health Lived Experience Tasmania commissioned by Primary Health Tasmania and authored solely by lived experience, this framework guides organisations through seven steps from principles and power sharing to co-production — a rigorous alternative to tokenistic participation grounded in self-determination, cultural safety, and fair remuneration. In 2024 it attracted international attention, directly informing the Head of Co-creation at Tees Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom.

Read More: seven-steps-framework-lived-experience.pdf

Janet Meagher OAM was the first Commissioner appointed to represent interests of people living with mental health challenges.

Janet Meagher OAM traced consumer involvement from grassroots activism and rights-based advocacy in the 1970s–80s to formal policy and service participation. She highlighted ongoing challenges including tokenism, representation quality, and tensions from professionalising consumer roles.

At TheMHS 2000, more than 200 consumers from Australia and New Zealand identified priority concerns and solutions, producing the “23 Big Issues” framework through a structured creating-solutions process.

The process showed the consumer movement’s ability to organise a national agenda independently after National Community Advisory Group’s closure, using TheMHS as a binational platform for collective voice.

Read more: themhs-conference-23-big-issues.pdf

Endorsed by Australian governments, the statement set out rights and responsibilities for consumers, carers, support people, providers, and communities, emphasising dignity, non-discrimination, social inclusion, participation, safety, quality care, and recovery-oriented practice.

Read more: mental-health-statement-of-rights-and-responsibilities-2012.pdf

The Australian Government established the National Mental Health Commission to provide independent oversight, reporting, and policy advice, improving accountability, transparency, and system performance across mental health and suicide prevention reform.

Released in 2015, the nationally recognised Certificate IV in Mental Health Peer Work formalised peer work training. Developed through national co-design led by MHCC, it standardised lived experience-led, recovery-oriented practice across Australian mental health services.

During NDIS rollout, people with psychosocial disability were progressively included, but eligibility required permanent and significant functional impairment. Many people, including former PHaMs participants, missed out, creating service gaps and prompting calls for supports outside the NDIS.

Initiated after the 2017 National Stepped Care Workshop and coordinated nationally from 2018, MHLEEN supported all 31 PHNs to embed lived experience perspectives in regional planning, commissioning, service design, co-design, and peer workforce development.

Douglas Holmes revisited the 2000 23 Big Issues, assessing their continuing relevance. The report found concerns such as access, stigma, choice, and consumer participation remained persistent, showing gaps between policy commitments and lived experience.

Read more: 23-big-issues-2018-themhs.pdf

At TheMHS 2019, consumer leaders produced an Agreed Statement calling for stronger national representation through a federation of state and territory consumer peaks. This model later informed development of a national consumer alliance.

After PHaMS was defunded during NDIS transition, advocates launched Bring Back PHaMS. Many people were ineligible for the NDIS, leaving gaps in flexible, recovery-oriented psychosocial support and prompting calls for community-based services outside the scheme.

Read More: https://bringbackphams.com/about

Endorsed in 2002, the standards outlined core knowledge, skills, and attitudes for mental health professionals, including consumer and carer participation, recovery-oriented care, and multidisciplinary practice.

Established to represent people using private mental health services, their families, and carers, the network addressed a gap in private-sector lived experience advocacy. Now Lived Experience Australia, it contributes to research, policy, planning, and reform.

Produced by MHCA, the Brain and Mind Research Institute, and HREOC, Not for Service documented poor care, injustice, access gaps, and limited reform progress since the Burdekin Report.

Read more: not-for-service-report

PHaMS was a Commonwealth-funded, NGO-delivered psychosocial support program offering flexible, recovery-oriented help with daily living, housing, health, employment, and social connection. It used strengths-based support and did not require a formal diagnosis.

Mid-2000s evaluations found consumer and carer inclusion had grown since 1992, but participation often remained consultative or representational, with inconsistent involvement in real decision-making.

Read more: aus-national-mental-health-beyond-frontier

Adopted by the UN in 2006, the CRPD shifted disability from a medical-welfare model to a rights-based framework, affirming autonomy, equal legal capacity, informed consent, participation, inclusion, and full recognition of rights.

Formed through an NTCOSS-auspiced project, NTMHC began as a working group of community-managed mental health organisations seeking a coordinated sector voice. It later became the Northern Territory’s community mental health peak.

Formed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander psychologists, AIPA became the national peak for Indigenous psychologists, promoting culturally safe practice, workforce development, equity, advocacy, and improved social and emotional wellbeing.

The 2008 policy renewed national reform priorities, emphasising recovery-oriented care, early intervention, social inclusion, whole-of-government action, improved access, stigma reduction, wellbeing, rights, and participation.

Read more: national-mental-Health-policy-2008

Queensland Voice was a consumer-led advocacy organisation representing people with lived experience in Queensland. It supported forums, networking, engagement, policy input, and sector discussion before ceasing operations and prompting a new statewide consumer peak.

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 established one of Australia’s broadest disability definitions, explicitly covering disorders affecting thought processes, perception, emotions, judgment, or behaviour — encompassing psychosocial disability from inception. Crucially, it protected against discrimination based on behaviour symptomatic of disability, closing a common exclusion loophole. Building on international rights momentum, it delivered the first enforceable Commonwealth protection grounded explicitly in psychiatric disability.

States and territories committed politically, not legally, to align Mental Health Acts with the 1991 UN Principles and national rights statement. Harmonisation was never achieved, leaving consumer rights inconsistent across Australia’s eight jurisdictions.

Read More: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.44.10.963

Tasmania’s early Community Advisory Group formed under the National Mental Health Strategy as an unincorporated consumer and carer voice. Though short-lived, it helped lay groundwork for later consumer-run organisations.

Held 25–27 November 1993 in Sydney, co-hosted by the Aboriginal Medical Service Cooperative Redfern and Royal Australian New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP), this landmark conference brought together Aboriginal communities, health workers, and advocates to define Aboriginal mental health on Aboriginal terms. It provided the direct foundation for the seminal 1995 Ways Forward report — Australia’s first national analysis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mental health, authored by Sr Pat Swan and Professor Beverley Raphael.

Established in 1993 under the National Mental Health Strategy, NCAG provided a national consumer and carer voice in reform, recognising lived experience expertise and longstanding powerlessness and human rights abuses in the sector.

The Federal Government disbanded NCAG in 1996. Its closure showed a recurring pattern: formal consumer participation structures were created with promise but under-resourced or wound back before a durable national consumer voice could develop.

Read More: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Former_Committees/mentalhealth/report/c03

TheMHS, held annually since 1991, hosted its first dedicated Consumers Day in Melbourne in 1994. Organised by consumers for consumers, it drew about 200 participants.

The first Indigenous Forum followed in Auckland in 1995 and the first Carer Forum in Brisbane in 1996, positioning TheMHS as a binational forum for consumers, carers, clinicians, managers, and Indigenous networks.

Authored by Sr Pat Swan and Professor Beverley Raphael, Ways Forward was Australia’s first national analysis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mental health. It recommended self-determination, an Aboriginal mental health workforce, stronger coordination, and improved research.

Read More: ways-forward-first-nations-mental-health-report

Developed by MHCC with Redfern Legal Service, the Mental Health Rights Manual gave consumers, carers, and the sector accessible plain-English information about mental health law and rights in one place.

Originally printed, the Manual moved online in 2010 and has been updated across five editions, most recently in 2021. It remains one of Australia’s longest-running consumer rights resources.

Read More: https://mhrm.mhcc.org.au/

Developed by Shery Mead in the mid-1990s, Intentional Peer Support offers a framework for mutual, transformative relationships based on shared experience, connection, co-learning, and social change. It is now used internationally, including in Australia through SHARC training.

Published under the National Mental Health Strategy, The Kit was a consumer-produced resource supporting consumers and carers to self-advocate and participate meaningfully in mental health policy and service delivery.

The Kit emphasised consumer agency and self-determination, reflecting the National Mental Health Strategy’s participation commitments and the wider mid-1990s push toward consumer-led resources.

Read More: https://www.academia.edu/17145630/a_Guide_to_the_Advocacy_we_choose_to_do

Endorsed by health ministers, the Standards created Australia’s first national mechanism for evaluating mental health services. They shifted quality assurance toward consumer outcomes and introduced paid consumer and carer surveyors within accreditation.

Read More: national-standards-mental-health-services-1996

Davidson’s landmark report exposed sexual abuse of women patients in Australian psychiatric institutions, challenging mixed-gender wards, inadequate training, and institutional silence. It anticipated trauma-informed care by insisting treatment settings must be safe and responsive to trauma histories.

Read More: https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1816439

Beginning as a grassroots ACT consumer movement in 1997 and formally established by 1999, the Network became the Territory’s consumer-led peak, advocating for mental health services and programs that work for everyone who needs them.

Established by the Commonwealth in 1997, MHCA became Australia’s first independent national mental health peak, bringing consumers, carers, clinicians, providers, researchers, and advocates together under one policy voice. It later produced Not for Service, auspiced NMHCCF, and rebranded as Mental Health Australia in 2014.

Read more: changing-perspectives-consumer-involvement-mental-health

A 1997 evaluation found the first National Mental Health Plan achieved major structural reform, including increased expenditure, growth in community services, and reduced psychiatric beds, but showed limited evidence of improved service quality.

The Second National Mental Health Plan identified 14 priorities, including consumer involvement, quality, outcomes, anti-stigma, and human rights. Despite participation mandates, consumer and carer involvement often remained tokenistic rather than genuinely power-sharing.

Established within Mental Health Australia, the Register created a trained national pool of consumer and carer representatives for policy and advisory work. It was replaced in 2026 by separate consumer and carer registers.

Commissioned by NSW Health Minister Laurie Brereton and chaired by David Richmond, the inquiry recommended replacing large psychiatric institutions with integrated community-based services. The NSW Government adopted the deinstitutionalisation agenda, closing institutions including Peat Island Hospital. Its legacy remains contested: while asylum conditions improved, inadequate community funding left many facing homelessness and fragmented support — setting the stage for Burdekin’s 1993 national human rights inquiry.

Read More: inquiry-health-services-richmond-report.pdf

The UN Decade of Disabled Persons provided a ten-year push for disability rights and inclusion, encouraging governments to act on the 1982 World Programme of Action Concerning Disabled Persons.

In Australia, its influence was gradual and indirect. Psychosocial disability was not formally recognised in Commonwealth anti-discrimination law until the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, reflecting ongoing tensions between national disability policy and state-run mental health systems.

Introduced on 1 February 1984, Medicare restored universal health insurance and covered psychiatrist rebates from the outset. Early mental health coverage remained narrow, excluding Medicare funded psychology and allied mental health services.

Medicare reinforced the Commonwealth–state divide: the Commonwealth funded medical care, while states retained hospital psychiatric services. Broad Medicare-subsidised mental health access, including psychology, did not arrive until Better Access in 2006.

By the mid-1980s, GROW had expanded peer support and mutual-aid groups across Australia’s states and territories, reflecting growing demand for community-based, lived experience-led alternatives to institutional psychiatric care during deinstitutionalisation.

The Disability Services Act 1986 reshaped Commonwealth disability funding but centred mainly on intellectual and physical disability. Consumer advocates lobbied for psychosocial disability to be explicitly included, with limited success, highlighting ongoing exclusion from Australia’s emerging disability rights framework.

Published in the bicentenary year, Pat Swan’s 200 Years of Unfinished Business linked child removal, dispossession, identity, intergenerational trauma, and distress among Aboriginal people, challenging narrow clinical explanations of Aboriginal mental health challenges.

Read More: 200-years-unfinished-business.pdf

Introduced in Crenshaw’s 1989 paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” intersectionality explains how overlapping identities — race, gender, disability, class, sexuality, and more — produce compounded, not merely additive, discrimination. For mental health consumers, the framework is essential: it explains why First Nations, CARM, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalised communities face barriers that treating psychosocial disability in isolation cannot address.

Read More: demarginalizing-intersection-race-sex.pdf

Adopted by all governments, the National Mental Health Strategy was Australia’s first national mental health policy coordination since Federation. It committed to consumer participation and direct ministerial access through Community Advisory Groups, though the National CAG was disbanded in 1996.

The Burdekin Inquiry exposed widespread human rights violations affecting people with mental health challenges across Australia, including poor housing, inadequate services, discrimination, and institutional mistreatment. Its findings called for rights-based reform, community-led services, early intervention, and national accountability.

Read more: https://humanrights.gov.au/resource-hub/by-resource-type/reviews-and-inquiries/report-national-inquiry-human-rights-people-mental-illness

Among Australia’s first consumer-led organisations, CAPIC and VAPP emerged in late 1970s Victoria, taking a radical anti-psychiatry position shaped by Szasz, Laing, Goffman, Foucault, and international survivor activism. Challenging forced treatment, institutional abuse, and denial of rights, they mark the earliest identifiable organised consumer and survivor activism in Australia.

Founded in 1978 by volunteers supporting people with mental health challenges and their families, Mental Illness Fellowship Victoria grew into a major psychosocial disability organisation. It provided rehabilitation, housing, employment pathways, and peer support, reflecting the grassroots family and carer movement alongside consumer activism during deinstitutionalisation.

Commissioned in 1827 as an invalid barracks for convicts and people then described as “insane”, Willow Court operated for 173 years. Later known as Royal Derwent Hospital, it became one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest asylums and Australia’s longest continuously operating psychiatric institution.

Over 1843 and into 1844, early Dangerous Lunatics Acts shaped coercive mental health law for more than a century in Australia, framing mental illness through risk, containment, and loss of legal personhood. People were confined behind asylum walls to reduce perceived danger to the wider community.

Opened at Darlinghurst in 1868 under the Lunacy (Amendment) Act 1867, the Reception House aimed to separate mental health care from criminal custody. It served as an observation ward and, for much of its life, Sydney’s main entry point to metropolitan psychiatric hospitals.

More Info: history-lunatic-reception-house-darlinghurst