Researcher brings lived experience to workplace change role
Lived Experience academic advocates for radical changes in workplace structure and roles.
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Louise Byrne was a teenager in Yeppoon when she had her first experience with the mental health system which she described as "appalling”.
Now she's a Lived Experience academic and advocate for radical changes in workplace structure and roles.
"There's a lot of work across the board when it comes to mental health services but rural and regional people are really missing out,” Dr Byrne said before Friday's Women with Disability panel discussion.
"I'm committed to remaining in this region so I don't lose touch with local issues.”
Dr Byrne said it takes courage for a Lived Experience mentor to expose his or her own experience with the cycle of mental illness and periods of healing.
"We like to believe the stigma of mental illness has reduced but it hasn't,” she said.
"People who are open about their struggles face discrimination and isolation, and sometimes coworkers don't collaborate with them.”
Dr Byrne said that while admitting to anxiety and depression has become socially acceptable, there are plenty of people who don't reach out when they feel they can't cope.
"When it comes to truly feeling like you've lost control of your own life, it doesn't matter what gender, people feel deeply ashamed and fear external stigma too,” she said.
"My research focuses on how workplaces can recognise it's part of normal life, that to some extent, everyone is going through the same thing.”
Dr Byrne joined two other panellists at the Women with Disability forum, on International Women's Day, which was hosted by the NDIS LAC Partner in the Community (PITC) Carers Queensland.
She said that people wait in line after her speaking events to say "I had those experiences too.”
"I've had women in their 50s and 60s tell me something traumatic happened to them in their teens which they've never told anybody else.”
Dr Byrne believes that individual organisations and the work sector as a whole have to evolve.
"We need champions with lived experience in mental health issues but we also need allies who have power within the system,” she said.
"They're only so much we can do from the outside.”
She said that taking on mental health issues is not about giving individuals a helping hand so much as providing the workplace with the broadest range of minds to tackle an outdated system.
"We prioritise the 'ideal worker' who turns up at nine and leaves at five but they don't really accomplish that much,” she said.
"When we've got video technology available, for example, why do we get in a car and sit in traffic for an hour to get to work?”
Dr Byrne says that all the millions of dollars promised by MPs are no use unless there's a willingness to provide complex solutions to a complex problem.
"Lived Experience workers understand that current systems and processes are linear; it feels like we're walking down a corridor and given the choice of only two doors to go through.”
"I envision a future in which we're shuffling around together, trying to work out how to go ahead, but always with that aim of making the workplace inclusive for the broadest range of people.”
Originally published as Researcher brings lived experience to workplace change role
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