Lived Experience Research Group
AUT’s Lived Experience Research Group is a community that centres first-hand personal knowledge of mental distress and addictions in research, led by and for people with lived experience and our allies.
Our projects
Explore our projects and see how we are contributing to knowledge and practice in lived experience research and inclusion.
Our people
Get to know our team of people with lived and living experience, and allies, working together to drive transformative change.
About us
We are committed to research by and for lived experience communities. People with lived experience of mental distress and/or addictions have long been the objects of study; however, we seek to centre lived experience in our research. Arising from the survivor movement, our work has a strong commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, social justice, and social change.
Our strength lies in the breadth of knowledge, perspectives, and experiences within our community. Our research is designed and led by people with lived experience who work across academic, community, mātauranga Māori, peer and survivor movement spaces. By centring LE voices and drawing together these diverse ways of knowing, we aim to generate research that contributes to meaningful and transformative change.
Our lived experience study pathway
If you have lived experience of recovery from mental health and/or addiction challenges and are using, or hope to use, your lived experience in peer support or other lived experience roles, you may be interested in studying one of our lived experience courses. These courses can be taken as part of the Graduate Diploma in Health Science or Graduate Certificate in Health Science.
For more information, please have a look at our Lived Experience Pathway flyer information or get in touch with us at LERG@aut.ac.nz
What is lived and living experience?
We understand lived and living experience as referring to the first-hand experience of mental health and/or addiction challenges, psychiatrisation, using mental health or addiction services, and/or navigating barriers to accessing these services when they are needed.
We also recognise whānau lived and living experience as a distinct but related form of lived expertise. Whānau can experience significant personal, relational, and structural harms while supporting loved ones and navigating mental health and addiction systems.
Recognising the diversity of experience
We recognise that these experiences are diverse and that people hold many different relationships to their own experience, including those who identify as tāngata whaiora, consumers, peers, psychiatric survivors, people who use drugs or as people who have navigated distress in their lives. We treat lived experience as an unfinished sentence, asking always "Lived experience of what?" so that the particular expertise our group holds is connected meaningfully to the work at hand, rather than treated as a general credential.
Lived experience as an epistemic contribution
Crucially, we understand lived experience as both a personal journey and a perspective that is accountable to a collective movement, including the traditions of Mad Studies, survivor research, and tāngata whaiora advocacy. In this way, we see lived and living experience as a redefining process around identity, self and our vision for the future. It is this collective knowledge base, built on shared stories and reflection, that constitutes lived experience as a distinct epistemic contribution that cannot be substituted by professional or academic knowledge alone.
Centring experiences of exclusion and system harm
While we acknowledge that distress is common and widely shared, our group particularly centres experiences of loss, prejudice, systemic racism, stigma, discrimination, and exclusion within mental health and addiction systems, recognising that it is often through the most challenging encounters with those systems that the clearest vision for what needs to change is shaped.