This year’s World Mental Health Day theme is “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.”
It’s a theme that sits close to my heart.
Every time someone with lived experience shares their story with me, I feel it deeply. Especially when they want to get better, but help is simply out of reach. In Malaysia, that barrier often looks like shame and guilt. Sometimes it’s cost. Sometimes it’s a waiting list that feels endless.
Every one of those conversations takes me back to why I’m in this work at all.
Years ago, I left the corporate world after caring for my father, who lived with bipolar disorder. I saw firsthand how hard it was to find help and care for him in a country where awareness was low and services were few and far between. I made a promise then to spend my life making sure others wouldn’t have to go through what he did.
It’s been six years since I made that transition. In the early years, much of my time went into advocacy, and that still matters deeply, especially in places where mental health is still poorly understood. But as I’ve grown in this work, I’ve found real joy in the doing: designing mental health programmes that actually work, and getting them to as many people as possible. I still say yes to advocacy when I can, like speaking on the radio about workplace anxiety, like in the photo above.
Yesterday I watched a video of a man in Africa who had been chained to a tree for 14 years because of his mental illness. It stayed with me.
Malaysia’s mental health journey is still young. But we’ve come a long way from the days when we, too, chained people to trees or hid them away in attics. That progress happened because people with lived experience spoke, and others chose to listen.
There’s still a long road ahead. But every voice heard brings us one step closer.
P/S: Photo at RTM’s Selangor FM radio interview recently.
