Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the inclusion of “Lived Experience” across mental health and suicide prevention initiatives including research, policy development, and project design. Broadly, ‘Lived Experience’ involves the experience of mental ill health and/or suicide (from ideation through to attempts), caring for those who are mentally unwell, and being bereaved by suicide. However, there has been a lack of focus on Lived Experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Indigenous Lived Experience is a relatively new area of research. A literature review conducted by the Centre of Best Practice in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention (CBPATSISP) revealed that the Indigenous experience of suicide is inherently different to mainstream experiences of suicide, and that there are factors unique to Indigenous Peoples that contribute to suicide that non-Indigenous people do not share, primarily the effects of colonisation.
Exploring the results of the literature review further, the CBPATSISP undertook an ethics approved workshop bringing Indigenous Peoples from across the country to discuss their lived experiences of suicide in a culturally safe way. In August of 2019, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lived Experience Centre was launched within the Black Dog Institute with funding from the Federal Government, to implement the first recommendation of the report, to establish an Indigenous Lived Experience Centre and Network.
The Centre’s primary goal is to embed the voices of Indigenous Peoples into research, evaluation, policy reform, and project design across mental health and suicide prevention initiatives. In acknowledging the necessity of contributing to the evidence base of Lived Experience, the evaluation of the Centre’s activities is critical. The aim of this project is to understand the experiences of the first cohort of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lived Experience Centre Network members, and evaluate the impact of their involvement as a network member on their own mental health, and that of the initiatives they support. The Centre is funded primarily for activities related to the setup and implementation of embedding Indigenous voices into mental health and suicide prevention initiatives.
We are seeking to engage Indigenous experts in research and evaluation to conduct the evaluation component of the Centre. According to the literature review undertaken for this project, there has very little research done examining Indigenous, lived-experience and peer-led programs in the mental health and suicide prevention space. Notably, even fewer programs that have been evaluated. This is critical information necessary to inform programs, processes and policy. Also critical is the evidence around short, medium and long-term impacts on participants after contributing to lived-experience forums. We are seeing and hearing experiences of healing and capacity building and if we can follow the stories of these participants, long-term risk and protective factors can be measured and documented.
This proposed project aims to fill this apparent gap in research via the stories of healing and capacity building expressed by participants to identify long term risk and protective factors for Australian Indigenous peoples.