In this course, you will advance your mental health nursing practice by engaging with lived experience perspectives as a critical foundation for contemporary care. You will critically analyse the historical, socio-political, and systemic contexts, including the survivor movement have shaped mental health services, and evaluate how current practices align with international human rights frameworks such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

You will apply knowledge of socio-political and structural determinants of distress to inform advanced nursing practice, and use recovery-oriented, hope-informed, and social citizenship frameworks to critique and enhance mental health care. The course emphasises the integration of peer work, co-design, and lived experience leadership, supporting you to examine collaborative approaches that transform service delivery across diverse practice contexts.

Through critical reflection and analysis, you will be supported to reorient your practice towards trauma-informed, culturally safe, and rights-based approaches, contributing to more responsive, ethical, and future-focused mental health care systems.

This course is co-designed, taught, and assessed by lived experience experts, positioning lived experience knowledge as central to teaching, learning, and evaluation. Rather than being included as a supplementary perspective, lived experience expertise is embedded across all components of the course, shaping curriculum content, pedagogical approaches, and assessment standards. This model reflects a commitment to co-production, epistemic equity, and the advancement of rights-based, recovery-oriented mental health nursing practice.

This course engages with lived experience narratives, including accounts of trauma and distress, and requires critical examination of current mental health practices. You will be supported to engage reflexively and ethically with this material, while also exploring strengths-based, recovery-oriented, and future-focused approaches to care.