Look here for the full article: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/ai-is-only-as-liberatory-as-the-people?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true If AI learns from the systems that have already pathologised certain voices — what does that mean for liberation work? I’ve been sitting with this question after a conversation with an AI that repositioned me as a risk object the moment I described my own mental state in my own terms. It’s not an i

Read the full article here: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/the-system-doesnt-know-we-disagree?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true There is something that happens in institutions that we don’t have very good language for yet. It’s not corruption. It’s not incompetence. It’s not even indifference, though it can look like all three from the outside. It’s something quieter and more insidious than any of those things. It’s the process by

Read the full post here: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/the-architecture-of-helping-why-mental?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true There’s a particular response that happens in mental health services when someone names something that isn’t working. It isn’t curiosity. It isn’t reflection. It’s a quiet, efficient redirecting of attention toward the person who said the thing — rather than the thing itself. In this piece I explore why t

Find the full article here: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/you-might-have-more-in-common-with?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true On lived experience, professional concealment, and the hierarchy the mental health system refuses to examine Here is a question that doesn’t get asked enough in mental health services: how many of the people treating patients have been patients themselves? Not rhetorically. Actually. Studies consistently f

Find the full article here: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/the-person-youre-trying-to-help-might?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true Lived experience is a form of leadership. The mental health system is threatened by that idea. I’ve written about why — including what happens when person-centred techniques get used as a tool for assumption rather than empowerment, and why the absence of a professional qualification is not the same as

Read the full article here: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/interpretation-arrives-too-early?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true Sometimes interpretation arrives too early. A person tries to describe an experience that doesn’t fit neatly into familiar language — grief, trauma, spirituality, collapse, transformation, disconnection, awakening — and almost immediately the system begins translating it into something clinically manageable.