The Australian Centre for Lived Experience and the Global Mental Health Action Network Statement for the United Nations Multistakeholder Hearing on Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs)

On May 2nd, I had the profound honour of delivering a speech at the United Nations Multistakeholder Hearing on Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs) and Mental Health, in New York—part of the lead-up to the UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs in September 2025 with the Global Mental Health Action Network United for Global Mental Health.

"Thank you chair, constituents and co-creators,

Good afternoon, I am Matthew Jackman, the founder of The Australian Centre for Lived Experience and a member of the Global Mental Health Action Network. 

I speak today as someone who has lived what we are here to change.

I was removed from my mother by child protection due to mental health issues. She died by suicide at age 28 while I was in foster care. I was nine years old. From that moment, I became the primary carer for my younger siblings—raising them in poverty, through school, in a home marked by family violence, addiction, and stigma, with no access to community mental health support. I ended up institutionalized for a year over 9 hospitalizations, often without addressing my needs, preferences or human rights. 

My distress was never just individual or about a broken brain. It was deeply social, political, and structural. We were impacted by systems that abandoned us. Later, I faced homophobia and gender-based discrimination as I came out as queer and non-binary—further compounding my distress, through honouring my mothers spirit within me – two spirit. 

That is why I urge Member States to politically declare an equitable financial investment in care away from harmful institutions—care that does not medicalize and pathologise human suffering, grief, trauma, poverty, or queerness amongst many intersectional identities. We need services that are rights-based, peer-led, culturally grounded, community based and person centred—where healing is not done to us, but led by us, drawing on our collective wisdom.

Mental health systems must move away from coercion and eliminate forced and involuntary treatment by moving toward connection, consent and collective care. Multisectoral governance must mean more than policy alignment—it must mean sharing power with those most affected, those with lived and living experience. 

Member states must resource and remunerate lived experience leadership—not as a gesture, but as a rights-based, economic and ethical imperative. Lived experience is expertise, it is a discipline and a social movement in our intersecting spaces.

Let us build systems that honour pain and survival—and trust people like us to co-lead the way forward, as those closest to the problems, are closest to the solutions in putting people first over profit. 

We don’t ask for a seat at your table, we invite you to co-create a new one. 

And as for harmful commercial determinant industries, here in the room, our mental health is not for sale.

It’s time we all take as stand as member states and civil society.

Thank you."