Saturday is World Mental Health Day, and this year’s theme is “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.”
I read through the campaign materials this week, and one line stuck with me.
The campaign calls on all of us to recognize the knowledge of people with lived experience “as a vital form of expertise.”
It defines lived experience as knowledge or understanding you get from going through something yourself, the kind that people who have only heard or learned about it don’t have.
And then it says the part I keep thinking about: “Too often, PWLE are asked to share their stories but excluded from decisions.”
(PWLE stands for people with lived experience. Public health loves an acronym.)
Not Therapy is built on the idea that lived experience counts as knowledge.
Every coach on our team has been through something hard themselves, and there are things you only know from the inside.
You know what the first week home from a program actually feels like, which questions from a parent land as support and which ones land as surveillance, and why “I’m fine” sometimes means “please don’t make me explain this right now.” None of that is in a textbook, and our coaches bring it to work every single day.
But the young adults we work with are experts too, and this is the part I want parents to hear.
Your young adult is the world’s leading expert on what it’s like to be them right now.
Think about who sees what. You see the closed door, the missed alarm, the plate left in the sink. The best professionals in their life see them for an hour or two a week.
Your young adult is the only person who is there for all of it, every hour of every day, inside their own head.
They know what their room feels like at 10 p.m., what actually happens in their head before a class they skip, and which things they’ve already tried that didn’t work. They know which days are hard and why, what helps even a little, and what makes everything worse. They know the difference between their tired and their sad, and between “I don’t want to” and “I can’t right now.”
And they know what they actually want their life to look like, which is the one piece of information every plan needs and the one that gets asked about least.
Even when they can’t explain it well yet, the knowledge is there. A lot of young adults have never been asked to put it into words, so the first few tries come out as a shrug or “I don’t know.” Usually, “I don’t know” means “nobody has waited long enough for me to figure it out.”
The campaign’s point is that being heard is only step one. It calls for moving “from listening to action,” and for building systems with people with lived experience, “not merely for them.”
It’s a policy goal, but it works at the kitchen table too. A lot of families we meet already know plenty about how their young adult is doing. They’ve heard the story from their young adult, from the professionals in their life, and from late night conversations with each other.
The young adult, meanwhile, often has the least say about what happens next. Decisions about their life get made on calls they aren’t on and in conversations that happen after they go to bed, almost always out of love and worry, and they can feel it.
Listening is still where it starts. A researcher named Guy Itzchakov has found that when people get high-quality listening, meaning attention, understanding, and good intentions toward them, they get less anxious and less defensive and more honest with themselves about the contradictions in their own thinking.
People make better decisions after they’ve been heard well, which is why listening comes first.
Here’s what this can look like at home.
💙 Stop asking for updates and start asking for actions. Swap “How did it go?” for “What do you think we should do about it?” One question asks them to report. The other puts them in charge of the next step. Updates turn your young adult into the subject of a case file, and after a while, every conversation starts to feel like a check in with a parole officer who loves them very much. Asking what they’d do next treats them as the person running their life, and most young adults rise to it faster than you’d expect. Their first answer might be bad. Ask anyway, and ask again next week.
💙 Let them mess up, even when you know it’s coming. When the stakes are survivable, like a job you think is a bad fit or a schedule you’d never choose, let it ride. Being trusted to be wrong is how people learn to be right. A young adult who has only ever followed your plan doesn’t know yet whether they can make their own, and every time you step in to save them from a small mistake, you confirm their fear that they can’t. Bite your tongue, let it play out, and when it goes sideways, skip the “I told you so” and ask what they learned. You’ll probably find they already know.
💙 Put them in charge of something that has nothing to do with their mental health. Let them plan the family dinner, the weekend trip, or the new phone plan. When a young adult has been struggling for a while, almost every conversation with them becomes about the struggle. Their sleep, their meds, their appointments, their progress. A young adult who only gets consulted on their problems starts to believe the problems are the most interesting thing about them. Handing them something normal to own reminds everyone, including them, that they’re a whole person with taste, opinions, and skills, and a problem is just one part of the picture.
💙 Ask for feedback on yourself. Try “What’s one thing I do that makes it harder to talk to me?” and then don’t defend yourself, not even a little. It’s a brutal question. You might hear something that stings, like that you sigh before you answer, or that every conversation somehow ends up about school. But your young adult is the leading expert on what it’s like to be parented by you, and you’ll never get that information anywhere else. Asking tells them their knowledge about your relationship counts too, and taking it without flinching shows them what it looks like to hear hard feedback and stay steady.
You don’t have to give up your own expertise to do any of this. You still know your family, your budget, and your limits, and those belong in the conversation too. The goal is to get both sets of knowledge in the room at the same time.
We see this in coaching all the time. Young adults who set their own goals tend to actually chase them, and the ones who had goals handed to them tend to quietly let them go.
Nobody needs a study to believe that one (though I’m sure there’s one out there).
Happy World Mental Health Day. This weekend, ask your young adult something you’ve been assuming you already know the answer to, and see what you learn.
💙Announcements💙
We have exciting news!
There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.
It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.
OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.
Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.
Any parent can join and it’s free.
Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.