Former CQUniversity lecturer Dr Louise Byrne receives award

She has spent the past 20 years working in and researching the ‘lived experience’ sector and now, her blood, sweat and tears have been rewarded. But all she wants is the message about ‘lived experience’ to be shared everywhere.

A former CQUniversity lecturer has taken what she learnt from delivering lessons online and put that into her latest project – a newly formed online training company teaching people how to use their ‘lived experience’ to help others seeking help.

The project is the culmination of 14 years of official research by former CQUniversity lecturer Dr Louise Byrne and her team at Lived Experience Leadership which launched a self-paced online induction Lived Experience training program in August.

Dr Byrne is currently Director and Founder of Lived Experience Training, Senior Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at RMIT and Assistant Professor Adjunct at Yale University.

While her formal work is being recognised tonight as she is awarded the 2024 Australian Mental Health Prize – Live Experience category, her journey with lived experience work started 20 years ago when she was 18-years-old while she worked as an untrained youth worker with Darumbal Youth Centre.

Dr Louise Byrne talking at the Rockhampton Library's inaugural Mental Health Expo.

“I actually taught online for seven years when I was at CQUniversity and I realised that there’s learning platforms and I knew how to work with them; I understood that modality and how to engage people,” Dr Byrne said.

She said it seemed like a really logical next step to take everything she had learned from teaching and research to create the self-paced online induction Lived Experience training program.

WHAT IS LIVED EXPERIENCE AND LIVED EXPERTISE?

Dr Byrne said the term ‘lived experiences’ referred to lived experiences of adversity in a broad way, such as mental health, or experiences of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, suicide, domestic violence, homelessness.

“It’s having those adverse experiences which significantly change your life, and basically, they change your life so much that they challenge your idea of who you are,” Dr Byrne said.

“You tend to stop and reassess your life and consider what your path is going to be going forward… those kinds of experiences which are big… bad enough to really shift us.

“Then ‘lived expertise’ is something that people with lived experience develop in order to be able to use their experiences in ways that are useful and beneficial to other people and particularly within service settings in the service sector.”

She said that meant the ‘lived expertise” was drawing on a “big body of work which has been produced internationally over many decades”.

Dr Louise Byrne has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Yale University in the United States

Dr Byrne said it was also about being part of a community that identifies as having those experiences and having a “potentially stigmatising identity and being proud about that”.

She said she had been through her own “pretty horrific experiences” which included hospitalisations, losing her partner, her job and her home.

Dr Byrne said it wasn’t long after a period where she “lost everything” she was introduced to the idea of peer support or lived experience work.

“It was like a gong going off… in my heart, in my soul, and it just resonated, and I just knew that’s what I had to do,” she said.

“Funnily enough, I’d been drawing on my lived experiences for years before that (Darumbal).”

‘IN MY HEART, IN MY SOUL, AND IT JUST RESONATED, AND I JUST KNEW’

Dr Byrne said one of the benefits of a relationship between a client seeking help and the person with the lived experience there to help them was it was a more comfortable relationship than one where the service provider is only relying on academia or other non-lived experience training.

“We’re in a vulnerable place with our health, or mental health or whatever it is,” she said.’

“It’s uncomfortable to start with for most people and when the person that you talk to has an acknowledged, public, lived experience that they are drawing from, it creates a more equitable start.”

She said other benefits included the client not being as concerned about being judged when talking to someone with lived experience and an easier communication experience as parties have “walked similar roads”.

Dr Byrne said one of the biggest benefits being able to overcome that “sense of powerlessness, that sense of not being capable or not being able or feeling lost” which comes particularly comes with mental health, as the client can see someone who represents a hopeful future in the lived experience peer.

“They can be transformed into a beacon of light for someone else,” she said.

“It’s truly a very, very healing experience.

“I think one of the great tragedies is that we still don’t talk about it enough, particularly those diagnoses that are more stigmatised.”

‘PHENOMENAL TO BE NOMINATED’

When asked about her response to receiving the Live Experience category prize, Dr Byrne said it was “very flattering”.

She said she was “blown away” by the fact that “someone would bother” to have nominate her.

“I feel a bit teary of, you know, the work I’ve done it, it actually really meant the world to me, and receiving the award is also excellent,” Dr Byrne said.

“But just that somebody would think of me, and the work I’ve done in those terms was phenomenal, really, really means a lot.

“And what I hope is that getting receiving award will allow me to bring greater, you know, publicity, to lived experience workforce in general, because it’s still not well understood.

“There’s still, you know, there’s still many, many people in this country have never heard of it, and that’s a crying shame. And what we need is critical mass.”

Dr Louise Byrne. Photo Allan Reinikka / The Morning Bulletin

CQU’s School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Sciences Deputy Dean (Learning and Teaching) Associate Professor Julie Bradshaw said she first met Louise when she began teaching an innovative subject, on the role of recovery for mental health consumers.

“I also was witness to Louise’s journey as she undertook her PhD while working full time,” she said.

“Louise was always inspiring. She enthralled her students in her stories on what it is to live with mental health issues.

“She inspired in her stories of what it is to go through the recovery journey.

“I am proud to have known this wonderful scholar in the early stages of her work.”

CQU Head of Bachelor of Nursing course Justine Connor said she was very fortunate to work with Louise during her time at CQUniversity.

“Her generosity in sharing her lived-experience challenges to the faculty... Through her research, teaching and learning, she made a significant contribution to the students and staff that she engaged with in the School, as well as far-reaching international impacts within the Lived Experience workforce,” she said.

“I would like to offer my sincere congratulations to Louise on this important occasion and applaud her commitment and strong leadership in the area of Lived Experience workforce development.”

Originally published as Former CQUniversity lecturer Dr Louise Byrne receives award