Sometimes, talking to someone who has faced mental health challenges too can help us feel understood and less alone. This World Mental Health Day, peer workers Samson, Lauren and Tim share how their own experiences inform the support they offer others.

Everyone’s experience of mental health is different. Peer support creates space for people to connect, share and learn from one another — something reflected in this year’s theme, ‘Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change’.

Through their videos, Samson, Lauren and Tim bring this theme to life, showing how lived experience can become a source of understanding, connection and hope.

Meet Samson, Lauren and Tim

As Peer Facilitators within our UOK Wellbeing Service, Samson, Lauren and Tim bring their own lived experience of mental health into the way they support others.

In these short videos, they talk openly about their experiences, why they chose to become Peer Facilitators and what can happen when we feel able to share what we’ve been through with somebody else

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It can help someone feel less alone. It can create connections. It can challenge assumptions about what people need. And, importantly, it can help shape support around the people actually using it.

Listening to lived experience isn’t about expecting someone to have all the answers because they’ve been through something themselves. It’s about recognising the knowledge and insight that can come from experience, and making sure there’s space for those voices to be heard.

How are you really feeling?

World Mental Health Day is also a good reminder to check in with ourselves. If things aren’t feeling quite right at the moment, there’s support available. How Are You Really Feeling?, a Sussex-wide resource brings mental health information, advice, and support together in one place. Lived experience and co-production were at the heart of developing it, helping make it easier for people to find the support that’s right for them.

You don’t need to wait until things feel overwhelming to reach out. And you don’t always need to have the perfect thing to say to someone else either. Sometimes, starting with “How are you, really?” – and making the time to hear the answer – is enough.

Explore ‘How are you really feeling’ signposting information