Have we lost our why?

We met with Mary O Hagan at TheMHS 2025 , here's our recollection of the conversation.

I have been in this movement for 40 years. I started when there was no lived experience leadership, no workforce, no policy telling services to involve us. The hospitals were still open. Community services barely existed.

I moved from Dunedin to Auckland with a backpack and helped start a group called psychiatric survivors. The people I worked alongside then were those having a very rough deal. People being exploited in boarding houses. People put into seclusion. People who could not get work and felt deeply wronged by the system.

Those were the people we mixed with every day. They were the reason we existed. Now, when I look around, I see something very different.

The people I spend most of my time with have jobs. They are relatively privileged. We are focused on protecting the integrity of the lived experience workforce, on building leadership, on expanding services. None of that is wrong. But I think we have lost sight of why we started.

 The purpose of this work was never the workforce itself. It was always about the people who are most marginalised, those still stuck in the system.

That shift matters.

If we are not careful, we end up advocating for ourselves rather than for those we are meant to serve. Part of the problem is that we have blurred who is advocating for whom.

In Australia, we now have lived experience peak bodies with individual membership. I think they should be focusing on the people who are marginalised and still using services.

At the same time, new organisations are emerging, such as peer workforce associations. They should be responsible for workforce and leadership advocacy.

Without that separation, there is a conflict of interest. It becomes difficult to hold both agendas at once. And when that happens, the people most impacted are the ones who lose attention.

We also get distracted.

We spend a lot of time on frameworks, strategies, and workforce development initiatives. These things can be useful. But they are means to an end, not the end itself. When they become the focus, we drift away from our purpose.I see this drift not just structurally, but culturally.

Another issue is how we understand power.

As advocates, we often have more power than we think. If we see ourselves as powerless, we behave as if we are powerless. That leads us into a dynamic where we position ourselves as victims. From there, it is a short step to becoming persecutors.

We move between these roles without recognising it. And in doing so, we lose the ability to act effectively.

It requires higher standards in how we engage with each other and with those we are advocating for. It requires us to build relationships, not just arguments.

So what do we do differently?

• First, we retrain ourselves to focus on the people who are most affected. Not occasionally, but consistently.
• Second, we separate advocacy roles more clearly. One group focuses on workforce and leadership. Another focuses on people who are currently in the system. That clarity ensures attention does not drift.
• Third, we raise our standards. How we treat each other matters. How we conduct advocacy matters.

We are now trying to address this by building participant and family engagement. The aim is to hear people’s stories, involve them in advocacy, and create opportunities for them to develop in ways they choose.

Too much is now mediated through the workforce. We need to create direct pathways for people to move beyond where they are, especially when that is not where they want to be.

There is also a risk for those entering the workforce today.

Forty years ago, we had the freedom to define our own identity. We rejected what the system told us and created something new.

Now, people enter established roles within systems that shape them from the start. That freedom is reduced.

We talk about peer drift. It is real, and it is insidious. Without strong identity, people risk becoming mini clinicians, especially in hospital-based environments.

We need infrastructure, training, and support to protect that identity.

 My parting thoughts

• We have to remember why we are here.
• We are easily distracted. We follow side paths into strategies, frameworks, and workforce initiatives.