Michael Elwan - Lived Experience Solutions LEXs

26/07/2026

A supervision note I use in training reads, in full: "𝗤𝘂𝗶𝗲𝘁. 𝗡𝗲𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲"

The worker it describes is a composite. She is the only Arabic speaker on her team, so she gets pulled across the service to interpret for colleagues and to hold the Arabic-speaking families. None of that sits on her caseload. In case conferences she listens, and speaks when the space is clearly hers.

Six words, and a whole worker reduced to a deficit. Nothing about the interpreting. Nothing about the families she carries. Nothing about what her quietness might be reading correctly about who holds power in that room.

What the note does is take work the service depends on and does not count, and turn it into a personality problem. The organisation's blind spot becomes her development goal.

The supervisor who wrote it was not careless. They were certain. That is the part I keep coming back to. We check the readings we feel unsure about. The ones we act on are the ones that feel obvious.

I ran a three hour national workshop on this for the AASW earlier in July, with a room of supervisors, coordinators and educators. Two things stayed with me. People could use the tools within minutes of being handed them. And three hours is nowhere near enough time to practise them.

The skill here is not conceptual. It sits in the sentence you say next, when a worker gives you a short answer and you can tell there is more underneath. You only get better at that by saying it badly a few times, somewhere it costs nothing.

Which is why most of this work belongs in supervision rather than in training. Training gives you the idea. Supervision is where you try it on a real case, with someone paying attention, until it becomes how you work.

I supervise social workers individually. I am also putting together small supervision groups for people who supervise practitioners across cultural difference, and I am gauging interest before I set dates and numbers. 𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝘄𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗮 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲, 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝗮 𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗜 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹.

My thanks to the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) for the opportunity, and to everyone who gave a morning to thinking honestly about their own supervision.

06/07/2026

There is a moment in almost every project that decides whether lived and living experience mattered, and it is easy to miss because nothing dramatic happens.

Someone has told their story. The room is moved. Then the meeting ends, and somebody goes away to write it up.

That is the moment. Whoever writes it up decides what the experience now means. They choose what is signal and what is noise, the framing, the language, the recommendations. They hold the pen. And in mental health, the pen is very rarely held by the person whose experience is on the page.

This is the question underneath both co-design and governance. Co-design asks whether people influenced the project. Governance asks whether they influenced the system. Both are circling something harder: when lived and living experience enters the room, who gets to decide what it means?

I have written about where the pen changes hands, why translation across language and culture widens the gap, and what sharing authorship would actually involve.

The move from being a source to being an author is, in the end, what lived experience leadership actually is. Not a seat. Not a title. The pen.

Award-winning social worker, national advisor, and PhD researcher Michael Elwan on co-design, power and lived experience leadership, and who gets to decide what lived experience means.

05/07/2026

Some of the men I have worked with learned early that silence was the safer choice. Speaking up looked like weakness, or a burden on the family, or a failure to hold things together the way a man is supposed to.

That is part of why I got involved with Recovery College WA.

I was recently featured in a short video about why I teach there. The Recovery College model is built on something I care about: learning rather than treatment, and a room where lived/living experience and professional knowledge carry equal weight. People come to build practical skills, share what they know, and connect with others, without shame or pressure.
For men in particular, that kind of space is rare. It lets you engage on your own terms.

Alongside the therapy, supervision and training I offer through Lived Experience Solutions, this community teaching keeps me close to the everyday practice the rest of my work is meant to serve. That matters to me.

If a course has ever crossed your mind, or you teach in this space yourself, the video is worth a few minutes.
https://www.warecoverycollege.org.au/educator-foundation-program

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afj5kh9WC0g&t=79s

Thanks to the team at WA Recovery College Alliance - WARCA for including me.

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22/06/2026

A practical note as the financial year closes. Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs) works with organisations in three areas: multicultural co-creation of services, resources, and programs; lived and living experience contribution to research and evaluation; and advice on policy, standards, and system design. Training for workforces, from multicultural mental health to su***de prevention in multicultural contexts, sits alongside these.

If your organisation has uncommitted funds this financial year, engagements can be scoped and invoiced before 30 June, with delivery in the new financial year. That applies to training bookings as well as consultancy.

And if the timing has passed for this year, July is when planning conversations start. I am always glad to have those early, before the shape of a project is locked in, since that is where lived and living experience input does its best work.

Details are on the LEXs consultancy and training pages below, or message me directly.

LEXs Training: https://www.lexs.com.au/lexs-training

LEXs Consultancy: https://www.lexs.com.au/lexs-consultancy

16/06/2026

Most mental health organisations now have a lived experience advisory group. Far fewer can say where lived and living experience sits in relation to their actual decisions.

That gap matters, because an advisory group is usually the beginning of embedding lived experience in governance rather than the completion of it. Governance is wherever decisions are made about priorities, resources, risk, and strategy. Some of that happens in committees. A great deal of it happens in budget processes, executive discussions, and the framing of a paper before it ever reaches a meeting.

Four questions tell you more about a governance structure than any participation count.

Is lived experience involved while the problem is still being defined, or only once the direction is set?

Does its advice reach the decision, or disappear into a reporting line?

Is the responsibility matched by remuneration, preparation, and support?

And when recommendations are not adopted, is that decision ever explained?

I have written a longer piece working through these questions, including why governance is precisely the level at which multicultural communities are least present and hardest to reach.

A seat that cannot change a decision is a courtesy. A seat that can is governance.

Award-winning social worker, national advisor, and PhD researcher Michael Elwan explores how organisations can embed lived and living experience in governance beyond advisory groups and consultation.

11/06/2026

I was 16 the first time I tried to explain my mother to a psychiatrist. I chose my words carefully, because I believed that if I was accurate enough, help would follow. He listened, and then he told me, with certainty, that she would either remain in hospital or take medication for the rest of her life.

I have thought about that room for most of my life. What stays with me is not what he said but what he never asked. How was she coping. How was I. What medication could and could not do. What recovery might look like. There was no cruelty in the room, only certainty, and at 16 I mistook certainty for reassurance.

Years later, my mother died by su***de, and the certainty I had been holding could not explain what had happened. For a long time, the weight of it was mine to carry.

I have written about that room in "When Treatment Becomes Fate", an article published in Psychiatric Services, the journal of the American Psychiatric Association Foundation. I am grateful to the editors of the Personal Accounts column, Patricia Deegan and William Torrey, for making room for it.

Diagnosis, medication and hospitalisation can be lifesaving. But they are not the whole of care. When treatment arrives without education, without relational care, without attention to a person's history and circumstances, responsibility settles on families, and no one names the transfer. Families like mine carry that weight in silence. Sometimes we carry the outcome too.

What I needed at 16 was a wider frame. Someone to say that treatment might help but would not solve everything, that recovery is uneven, that distress is shaped by more than biology, and that families should not carry this alone.

Read "When Treatment Becomes Fate": https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.20260292

If this raises anything for you, support is available. Lifeline 13 11 14.

PsychiatryOnline.org is the platform for all American Psychiatric Association Publishing journals, DSM, and bestselling textbooks, as well as APA Practice Guidelines, and continuing medical education.

10/06/2026

Co-design has become one of the most influential ideas in mental health. It is also one of the most common places where good intentions stall.

Most co-design processes are judged through participation. How many workshops were held, how many people attended, how diverse the group was. Those numbers matter, but they are not what decides whether co-design works.

The questions that decide it are quieter.
Who held authority?
Who controlled the resources?
Who made the final decision?
What changed because people took part?

A process can be highly participatory while leaving decision-making exactly where it started. People can be welcomed, heard, and genuinely thanked, and still end up observers of decisions rather than authors of them. Presence and influence are different things, and most of our measures only count the first.

I have written a longer piece on why co-design fails in mental health: where it starts too late, why the same few voices are asked to carry the work, what happens to multicultural communities when timelines tighten, and what accountability after the workshops actually requires.

https://www.lexs.com.au/post/why-co-design-fails-in-mental-health

If you have sat in a co-design process, on either side of the table, I would be interested in where you have seen influence genuinely shift.

Award-winning social worker, national advisor, and PhD researcher Michael Elwan explores why co-design in mental health often fails and what meaningful participation requires.

31/05/2026

I’ve updated the LEXs training page.

It now more clearly reflects the training I provide across multicultural mental health, su***de prevention, CaLD men’s mental health, family conversations, and culturally responsive supervision.

Much of this work sits in the conversations services often know are important, but can feel underprepared to hold: culture, silence, grief, shame, masculinity, family expectations, help-seeking and su***de risk.

LEXs training is tailored with each organisation, team or professional group, rather than delivered as a generic program.

You can view the updated page here:

https://www.lexs.com.au/lexs-training

29/05/2026

Most social workers know they "should reflect" in supervision. Fewer have good questions ready when they actually sit down.

So I've put together a free bank of reflective supervision questions, organised by what you might be bringing: ethical tension, risk, blurred boundaries, the emotional load that builds up quietly over time.

A couple from the set:

What is being framed as an individual issue that may be structural?What belongs in supervision rather than in the client, family or team space?
What is one thing I can put down?

They're prompts, not a script. Useful before a session, during, or after. Made for social workers, but supervisors, students and allied health practitioners may find them useful too.

https://www.lexs.com.au/post/reflective-supervision-questions-for-social-workers

Pass it on to anyone heading into supervision.

A practical question bank for social workers preparing for reflective supervision, with prompts for ethics, risk, culture, boundaries, use of self and professional judgement.