30/01/2025 
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We invite you to join us for our monthly meetings on the last Thursday of the month 10.30 – 12.00.
Lived experience is much more than just an experience of mental illness. It includes an understanding of marginalisation, oppression and discrimination because of our lived experience, and subsequently, our identities. How do we use our lived experience to challenge power imbalances and allow us to create a more collaborative and authentic relationship with friends and family, co-workers and colleagues, and service providers and receivers?
The stigma of being labelled with a diagnosis, and the accompanying narratives often leads to service providers and commissioners adopting what can feel like a “them and us” demeanour.
The LEN will be a space where lived experience can be celebrated and highly valued. This co-created forum will explore how lived experience can provide therapeutic and healing possibilities, as well as challenge the stigma and misconceptions of living with a mental illness diagnosis.
Together we can explore opportunities that we can access, provide peer and mentor support to one another, and gain a better understanding of ourselves and accepting our identity and lived experience as a valuable resource.
The network will be facilitated by Neels who has been a member of therapeutic community. Drawing on her own lived experiences of being diagnosed and labelled, fighting the stigma and surviving in a society that can be punitive and punishing, she will be creating a safe space for people with lived experience to come together.
Thursday 30th January 2025
We look forward to seeing you there!
Facilitators
Neelam Khawani-Connett
Neelam Khawani-Connett has a diagnosis and lived experience of personality disorder. She graduated from a therapeutic community in the UK over 10 years ago, having battled with her own depression from a very young age. The skill-set she has developed allows Neelam to work collaboratively alongside mental health practitioners to support service users & raise awareness of personality disorders and emotionally challenging behaviours. She is a KUF trainer and a group facilitator, helped establish one of the therapeutic communities in Buckinghamshire, co-developed the TCEPT course and leads reviews in therapeutic communities and enabling environments for two projects within The Royal College of Psychiatrists. Since she has been in Goa, Neelam is a member of the Hank Nunn Institute trust board, helps deliver webinars, is a staff member of their academic therapeutic community, Mosaic, and co-facilitates the greencare group, GreenCloud International. More recently, she has been co-opted on to The Consortium of Therapeutic Communities trust board.
Vikki H
Vikki is Lived Experience Co-ordinator at CHT, working to develop their Experts by Experience programme.
Her current journey began with volunteering as a Peer Supporter in women’s substance use services. Since then, she has worked as a Co-production and Engagement Worker, mentoring people with experience of multiple disadvantage (combined homelessness, mental health issues, substance use, domestic abuse and interaction with the criminal justice system), as a Lived Experience Trauma Informed Trainer in the NHS co-facilitating training for staff, a Peer Trainer in Recovery College co-facilitating psychoeducational groups for people who had experienced trauma, and as Research and Learning Officer within a systems change team.
In this presentation she will share her thoughts on how we can use Trauma Informed Practice to support our wellbeing as Experts by Experience, and a co-produced toolkit for employers and the people with lived experience that they employ.
