You Might Have More in Common With Your Patients Than You’re Allowed to Admit

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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 find that a disproportionate number of people who enter the helping professions do so because of their own experiences of distress, trauma, or mental ill health. Which raises a question the system has never really wanted to sit with. If lived experience is a liability — something that requires management, guidance, gentle redirection — then what exactly is happening in the staff room?

Here is the contradiction worth naming. In some roles within mental health services, disclosure of lived experience is not just permitted — it is the point. It is what gives the role its legitimacy, its standing, its reason to exist. Lived experience, in these contexts, is officially recognised as expertise.

And yet the clinicians working alongside those roles — many of whom have their own histories of mental ill health, their own encounters with the system from the inside — are expected to conceal it. In the name of professionalism. In the name of a therapeutic frame that has decided, somewhere along the line, that the helper must present as someone who has never needed help.

So we have built a system with a very particular architecture. The person whose lived experience is visible is the one whose expertise is most frequently questioned. The people whose lived experience is hidden are the ones whose expertise is assumed.

Nobody is supposed to notice that this is an extraordinary arrangement.

There is a performance required of mental health professionals. The performance of having it together. Of being the stable one. The regulated one. And within that performance, lived experience becomes a secret — carefully managed, disclosed only in the right conditions, to the right people, if at all.

So here is the question worth leaving in the room.

If you are a mental health professional with your own lived experience — and you are hiding it — what does that tell you about the system you are working inside? Not about you. About the system.

Because the person sitting across from you might be hiding the same thing you are.

The difference is, only one of you is allowed to.