From lived experience to the international stage: reflections from ISPS 2026

Peer Mental Health Researcher Harry Dyson has contributed to the BRC-supported Psychosis and Urban Living (PAUL) Project since its inception several years ago. In July of this year, he attended and spoke at the 24th congress of the International Society for Social and Psychological Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) in Lausanne, Switzerland. In this post, Harry shares his reflections on this experience.

Please can you tell us a bit about how you came to the attend ISPS 2026?

I started doing lived experience involvement work with my local NHS trust when I was under an early intervention in psychosis team in 2020. Working on the PAUL project was the first time I became involved in research. I was able to take part in this work from the initial small grant proposal onwards.

Psychosis was a distressing and disruptive experience that had left me feeling disorientated and directionless. At this time, the chance to work in research opened up a path forward for me and led to further opportunities.

Because of my involvement with the PAUL project, I was invited to speak as part of a symposium titled ‘Grounded Recovery: Co-Designing Mental Health Interventions Through Place and Experience’ at ISPS. I was able to attend in-person thanks to the support of Bristol BRC, the McPin Foundation, the PAUL project and the ISPS lived experience scholarship.

You presented at the congress. How did it go?

I presented alongside three other people:

  • PAUL project lead Mark Batterham who spoke about mapping the provision of place-based interventions to support recovery from early psychosis
  • Dr. Lilith Abrahamyan Empson who spoke about working with local institutions to promote service-user participation in city life
  • Prof. Dr. Frédéric Haesebaert who spoke about collaborative nature-based interventions for early psychosis

My talk was titled ‘Situating Psychosis Recovery’. I contrasted my experiences of inpatient and community based mental health services. I presented last, which I think made for an interesting symposium. I hope my talk served to ground and underline the three preceding talks and highlight what is at stake.

Did you get the chance to meet others with ‘lived experience’?

Yes! More than I had expected. A couple of psychiatrists quietly told me that they have their own lived experience but aren’t public about this for fear it could damage their reputation or credibility. I also met Helene Speyer, a psychiatrist and researcher who is explicit about her lived experience, seemingly to great success – so maybe there’s a paradigm shift occurring here.

The conference had some dedicated spaces and sessions for people with lived experience. At the same time, lived experience felt woven throughout a lot of the programme. Jacqui Dillon was among the opening keynote speakers, and the closing ceremony featured a reflective session with Debra Lampshire (disappointingly, however, this was cut short because the previous keynote speaker – a psychiatrist – ran significantly over their time)

With ISPS’s focus on psychological and social approaches to psychosis, did the biomedical aspect feel quite distant?

I went to one talk about oxidative stress / redox dysregulation as a potential mechanism for environmental stress to contribute to mental health outcomes! But yes, for the most part the biomedical felt distant – often critiqued, at times villainised.

Where the critiques felt most valid to me was when biomedical narratives have naturalised suffering and injustices. The question I came away with is what sort of things does a discipline maintain, legitimise, or validate?

Courtenay M. Harding talked about the Vermont program. Her research challenged beliefs about incurability and the inevitability of a downward course with a schizophrenia diagnosis – finding that people with some of the most severe presentations can and do go on to recover. The idea of a hopeless biomedical destiny had been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But I don’t see this problem as unique to the biomedical. Some practices are harmful and wrong regardless of whether they’re justified by biological, psychological, sociological, theological, or any other narrative. The history of stigmatisation, neglect, and maltreatment of mad or otherwise ‘deviant’ people long predates modern biomedical psychiatric thinking.

James Kirkbride’s epidemiological keynote showed stark inequalities along ethnicity and social class. Rather than working to validate or legitimise this status quo, he sketched out how these findings reveal potential interventions to improve people’s outcomes and move towards mental health social justice.

Perhaps the flipside of my first question is: what sort of things can a discipline produce and enable?

Harry Dyson is a Peer Researcher and Public Involvement Officer at the McPin Foundation – a charity with a mission to embed lived experience in mental health research. His work centres on psychosis research.