Hamilton Centre Podcast | Exploring Mental Health & Addiction · Hamilton Centre

EP 8 - The role of lived experience in shaping mental health and AOD care

·53 min·3 clips

Ben Venker says a 12-year-old help-seeking moment led him to leave treatment with a new purpose.

1. Hamilton Centre Podcast EP 8 focuses on lived experience shaping mental health and alcohol and other drug care in Victoria. 2. Annie Williams hosts; Ben Venker leads Lived Experience Workforce and Advocacy at Turning Point, and Tharindu Jayadeva works across mental health and community participation with Butterfly Foundation, Mental Health Victoria and Alfred Health. 3. The episode asks how lived and living experience can change services, reduce stigma, and improve integrated care. 4. Ben says he sought treatment about 12 years ago after using substances daily and met a practitioner who also had lived experience. 5. Tharindu says school isolation, skin colour, lunch food, and body shame fed his later eating disorder and advocacy work. 6. Ben now supports a growing lived experience workforce at Turning Point and also helps clinical leaders work alongside it. 7. Tharindu describes community-level work that includes co-design workshops, service design, and participation in decision-making. 8. Annie asks whether national lived experience guidelines also apply to community engagement work, and Tharindu points to consumer and service-user partnership guidance. 9. Ben cites a federal inquiry into AOD harms in the Australian community and says he made a personal submission and joined Turning Point’s submission. 10. Tharindu says lived experience storytelling helped shift understandings inside a regular committee where clinical, administrative, and finance staff all affected community members. 11. Ben says the phrase “welcome to recovery” gave him a choice and a period of stability after destructive substance use. 12. Tharindu says he works at the “speed of trust” and prefers “safe enough” spaces over promises of absolute safety. 13. Ben says stigma often appears as language or behaviour from well-intentioned staff, which is why he uses group supervision and direct feedback. 14. Tharindu says comfort and discomfort are both limiting, and the productive place is a “stretch zone” between them. 15. Ben says he felt a responsibility to speak loudly and proudly after years of shame and guilt about dependent drug and alcohol use. 16. Tharindu says recovery is ongoing and not always a label that every person wants to use for themselves. 17. The interview style is reflective and personal, with Annie Williams steering the discussion through stories, definitions, and practical examples. 18. The energy is calm and conversational, with repeated emphasis on curiosity, vulnerability, and collaboration. 19. Best for listeners interested in peer work, co-design, and stigma reduction. 20. Skip if you want a fast, highly scripted clinical explainer.

As heard by us

Lived experience is treated as practical knowledge in mental health and addiction care.

Lived experience is treated here as practical knowledge in mental health and addiction care, not as a badge or a decorative credential. The emphasis stays on how people with lived and living experience can shape workforce culture, policy, service design, and integrated care,…

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Hear how lived experience reshapes care when stigma, workforce culture, and policy sit in the room.

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