From lived experience perspectives, to campaigns around welfare reform, trainings on Disability justice and Palestinian liberation, and research into the ethics of media engagement with people with lived experience — 2025 was a busy and productive year for NSUN!
Member perspectives
In February–May 2025 we published a series of blogs from NSUN members exploring lived and living experience work, and its limitations. We heard from members on experiences of exploitation, discrimination and tokenism within lived experience spaces, and imagined an alternative: a system in which lived experience work is valued and compensated fairly, where those who mental health services aim to support are at the centre of its decision making. Click the links below to take a look at the blogs.
“You could just listen to me”: the erasure of lived experience in healthcare
By Jay
Lived Experience is Not Enough: the Illusion of Inclusion in Mental Health Spaces
By Chris Frederick
Referring to your lived experience without self-reflection and accountability
By C. C. da Cunha Lewin
The Possibility of a Lived Experience Industrial Complex
By Charli Clement
Lived Experience Washing
By Laura
Irish Travellers and the exploitation of Lived Experience
By Chelsea McDonagh
Can There Be a Lived Experience “Community”
By Leila
Monetising my mental health: the price of trauma
By Yasmin
The Dynamics of Confession from Psychiatric Services to Digital Activism
By Hazel McMichael
You can read all of the blogs we published in 2025 here.
Policy & campaigns
The Community Mental Health Services Inquiry
In December 2024, the Health and Social Care committee announced an inquiry into community mental health services with the goal of engaging meaningfully with service users to examine the state of community mental health services and identify areas of improvement. NSUN’s Head of Policy & Campaigns, Courtney Buckler, was invited to give evidence in Parliament in February of 2025, an experience which affirmed their pre-existing understanding of the distribution of power and knowledge in these spaces, which they wrote on for the NSUN blog. Meanwhile, NSUN’s policy and comms teams were working to put together their written evidence for submission with input from the NSUN membership. You can read the submitted evidence here, and watch Courtney’s contributions in Parliament here. On December 2nd, the Health and Social Care committee released a full report including their recommendations, which you can read here.
Why the mental health sector should be doing more to protect trans rights
In March 2025, on Transgender Day of Visibility, NSUN mobilised across the mental health sector, bringing together seven other mental health charities to commit to doing more to protect trans rights.
We called on Centre for Mental Health, The McPin Foundation, Mental Health First Aid England®, Rethink Mental Illness, Mental Health UK, Student Minds, and Mind to 1) reject the co-option of mental health for transphobic ends 2) prioritise support for work that is trans-led, 3) advocate for trans rights and 4) challenge barriers faced by trans people in accessing mental healthcare.
Read the full statement.
Surveillance in mental health settings
Since its launch NSUN has worked closely with the campaign group Stop Oxevision in support of their campaign to halt the use of surveillance technology, Oxevision in psychiatric hospitals in England. In response to Stop Oxevision’s powerful campaign and wider concerns around increased use of surveillance technologies in mental health care, on 7th February 2025 NHS England published new principles on the use of digital technologies in mental health inpatient settings. We wrote on the long-overdue publication, naming its failure to adequately halt the roll-out of potentially unlawful technologies and making alternative demands of NHSE.
Eight months later, after Oxevision’s attempts to rebrand under the new name, LIO/LIO Health, the controversial surveillance technology came into focus during The Lampard Inquiry, an independent statutory inquiry investigating the deaths of more than 2,000 people under the care of psychiatric services in Essex between 2000-2023. The Stop Oxevision team were invited to offer evidence, and detailed grave ethical concerns with the technology and called for the end of camera usage in mental health patient bedrooms. On Tuesday 14th October, Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust admitted that “there is the possibility” that Oxevision is being misused, not just at EPUT, but at all trusts using it. Following the inquiry, we released a statement calling on all trusts using Oxevision to suspend usage immediately, which you can read here.
In 2026, we continue to support Stop Oxevision in their campaign to halt the use of LIO/Oxevision in psychiatric hospitals. Find out more about the campaign and how you can offer your support.
Migration and mental health: why we won’t stop talking about it
Over the past few years, migration has taken up ever more space in the headlines. With relentless news stories about small boats and the presence of violent groups outside hotels housing people seeking asylum, the Government is stepping up its cruelty towards migrants in an attempt to appease the far right. With all of this going on, we at NSUN feel the need to reiterate our position; that migration is not a crime, and that all people deserve to move freely without fear of persecution or violence. Beyond this basic ethical stance, we also wish to reiterate why, for us, migrant justice will always be a mental health issue.
Read the full blog by Kieran Lewis, NSUN’s Rights & Migration Policy Manager.
Welfare reform
In April 2025, the Government announced proposals to reform welfare payments for Disabled people through the Pathways to Work Green Paper, including those living with mental ill-health, distress and trauma. NSUN was appalled by these proposals, which threatened to worsen Disabled people’s living conditions, push more people into poverty, and exacerbate the harms of a welfare system that is already killing people. The proposals marked the beginning of a months-long campaign, which we conducted with the support of our membership. We began by unpacking the reforms in jargon-free, accessible language: what they were and what our membership could do about them.
In May, NSUN’s Rights & Migration Policy Manager, Kieran Lewis, signed up for one of the DWP’s consultation events, which purported to engage with Disabled people on the reforms proposed in the Pathways to Work Green Paper. Kieran wrote on his experience inside the DWP’s sham consultation.
In June, we hosted a discussion space for NSUN members to discuss the proposed changes to Disability benefits, ask questions and connect with other members. Members were also given the opportunity to contribute to NSUN’s consultation response, which we published in full on June 17th.
Devastatingly, on July 1st, the Universal Credit Bill and Personal Independence Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons, following a chaotic and last-minute concession. While tireless campaigning from Disabled people and their organisations saw the removal of clause five which related to reforms to PIP, the way in which the bill was passed, and its contents show callous disdain for the lives of Disabled people.
We published a response to the passing of the bill, and affirmed our commitments moving forwards and in relation to the Timms Review into the PIP process, which is ongoing.
Events, trainings and networking
In 2025 we continued to offer monthly Network Meetings to NSUN members, coming together to connect, skill-share and hear about a diverse variety of topics from survivor researchers, user-led groups and NSUN team members. From a practical workshop on how to map power in the Mad movement, to a discussion on the Government’s plans to reshape the welfare system and facilitated conversations on providing lived experience expertise in a non-lived experience space and current issues in mental health policy, all the way to introductions to user-led groups such as the Bristol Borderline Personality Disorder Collective and Not the Void.
We were proud to launch Mad Campaigns Lab in 2025, a drop-in networking and skill share-space for Mad and Disability justice campaigners. Led by our policy team, this monthly space was designed to support members to campaign around issues related to mental healthcare, Mad liberation, and Disability justice.
We also facilitated multiple trainings across 2025, offering the NSUN membership the opportunity to attend a workshop on monitoring, evaluation and learning for user-led groups, learn about the history of LGBTQ mental health in the UK in historian Jack Doyle’s workshop: Madness, Queerness & The State and hear from Palestinian-led educational organisation Makan on the concepts of disability and disablement in relation to Palestine: Disability justice and Palestinian liberation.
If you’d like to attend our events in 2026, keep an eye on our News & Events page!
Survivor research
Not Just a Story: The media’s engagement with people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress or trauma
During the spring and summer of 2025, we surveyed 141 people and ran two focus groups with NSUN members to hear about their experiences of engaging with the media as people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress or trauma. What we learnt was clear: the media and its journalists are consistently failing to genuinely and supportively engage with people with lived experience and sensitively represent their so-called ‘stories’.
People with lived experience of mental ill-health are often motivated to share their experiences with the media because of a desire to raise awareness, provide representation – particularly of lesser-platformed experiences which may not receive much mainstream attention – and advocate to improve the experiences of others. However, even when it might aim to spotlight injustice, provide activists with a platform, or challenge the status quo, the media’s approach to extracting and sharing deeply personal and often painful or traumatic parts of peoples’ lives can cause harm.
While some participants in this project reported positive elements of engaging with the media, we predominantly heard of negative experiences. People spoke of a feeling of tokenism inherent to their contributions, a lack of considered care, clarity, and guidance, and limited control over the process of engagement, anonymity, and the angle and content of the final piece. We found that few participants were compensated for their time, which may contribute to a sense that the work of lived experience experts is not valued or respected.
We are now in the final stages of this research, for which focus group attendants have reviewed the final draft and offered feedback. Our communications team will work to revise the final draft with these edits, and hope to share the final report with the NSUN membership in spring of 2026. Watch this space!