Last Saturday was World Mental Health Day, a day dedicated to raising public awareness and promoting the development of mental health services.
This year, the official global theme was "Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change", which means the voices of people living with mental illness were heard clearly.
Across social media, many shared their personal stories: how they struggled with their symptoms, how people saw them, and what it was like to finally seek professional help.
These stories matter, but sharing experiences is only the first step. The real test is whether we include people with mental illness in planning the services designed for them.
This sounds obvious, yet it can be surprisingly challenging in practice. In a recent workshop on mental well-being, I asked participants a simple question: would you still consult a doctor if you knew that he or she had been diagnosed with a mental illness?
The room fell quiet. A few hands went up, many did not, and some participants admitted they would quietly look for another doctor. When I asked why, the answers were honest: worries about judgment, reliability, and whether a doctor who "struggles himself" could help others.
I was not surprised, but the answers made my point better than any lecture could.
We speak warmly about acceptance and inclusion, but when mental illness comes close to us, when it sits across the desk in a white coat, our hidden assumptions surface.
Doctors are not immune to mental illness. Depression, anxiety and burnout are common among healthcare workers, partly because of long hours, emotional strain and a culture that expects them to be strong at all times. Many suffer in silence precisely because they fear the reaction my workshop participants displayed.
A doctor who seeks treatment, recovers and returns to work is not a risk to patients. The real risk is the doctor who hides the illness and never seeks help at all.
The same principle applies more broadly. People who have experienced depression, psychosis, or addiction possess knowledge no textbook can provide. They understand what it is like to wait months for an appointment, to be spoken about rather than spoken to, to leave hospital without a clear plan, or to face a family that does not understand. Lived experience is not a weakness to manage; it is expertise to draw on.
Many countries now involve people with lived experience in designing mental health services, reviewing policies, training staff, and working as peer support workers alongside doctors and nurses. Peer workers, people who have recovered from mental illness themselves, can offer hope in a way professionals cannot.
In Oman, we have made real progress in expanding mental health services and reducing stigma. The next step is to move from awareness to participation. This could start simply by including service users and family members on hospital committees, inviting their feedback when new services are planned, and involving them in training medical students and health professionals. It also means creating workplaces, including hospitals, where staff can seek help for their own mental health without fearing for their careers.
This will be easy. It requires professionals to share some of their authority, and also requires society to examine its own prejudices honestly, as my workshop participants courageously did.
In my opinion, if we truly believe that mental illness is like any other illness, then we must be ready to listen to those who live with it, work alongside them, and yes, be treated by them.
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