Realising a Good Life: Our Shared Path to Human Rights
For many of us living with psychosocial disability or mental health challenges, human rights can feel like an abstract concept rather than a daily reality.
Making Rights Real is a co-design project that recognises lived experience as the foundation for meaningful systemic change.
Guided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD), our project contributes to a future where human rights are not just legal obligations but are truly respected and reflected in mental health policies, services, and community life.
A Resource Authored by Lived Experience
This resource was authored by the Making Rights Real Co-Design Group — a collective of 16 people from across Australia with lived experience of psychosocial disability and mental health challenges. Our group represents a diverse range of identities, including Trans, Non-binary, Queer, First Nations, and CARM (Culturally and Racially Marginalised) communities.
Our 12-month journey (June 2025 – May 2026) was an iterative co-design process designed to move from the friction of systemic harm to the flow of human rights-affirming practices. We followed a seven-stage thinking cycle:
- Foundational Safety: We co-designed a “living safety agreement,” acknowledging that for voices to be heard, safety must be a dynamic, shifting process.
- Envisioning a Good Life: We noticed patterns in our shared hopes and dreams to articulate a collective vision for the future. By connecting these aspirations directly to UNCRPD Articles, we realised the Convention gave us the formal language to advocate for our inherent rights.
- Understanding Human Rights Journeys: Through seven 90-minute empathy interviews, we explored personal journeys of autonomy. We identified where rights were upheld and where the system failed, providing the raw data for mapping systemic pain points.
- Identifying Systemic Barriers: Using systems thinking, we mapped the “Iceberg” of systemic impediments. We looked beneath the surface to identify the mental models (like the paternalistic medical model) and structures (like lack of accountability) that block our path to a good life.
- Ideating Solutions: We asked: “How might we dismantle these barriers?” This led to the creation of the Blueprint for Partnership and the Warm Entry Protocol—tools designed to prioritise relational anchoring and human connection.
- Creative Synthesis: To turn our insights into accessible tools, we collaborated with four lived experience writers and a lived experience illustrator.
- The Feedback Loop: We held 19 refinement sessions where co-designers reviewed every draft, illustration, and message to ensure the final content remained a true reflection of the group’s collective wisdom.
It’s About Barriers, Not Labels
At the heart of this project is a human rights-based understanding of disability.
We recognise that the term “disability” can be complex. You might not call yourself “disabled”, and you do not need to adopt that label to utilise our resources.
In the UN CRPD framework, disability is not necessarily connected to a diagnosis. Disability is what happens when our mental health challenges – especially when these challenges are long-term, recurring, or have lasting effects – pushes up against barriers in the world around us.
These barriers can include:
- Discrimination.
- Being dismissed or not believed.
- Not being able to get the support we need.
- Being excluded from work or housing.
- Being treated in ways that take control away from us.
If the way systems or people respond to our mental health challenges limits our choices, safety, participation, or dignity, then the UN CRPD is intended to speak to that experience.
The Making Rights Real project seeks to amplify our collective voice. This is because the UN CRPD provides guidance about how all of us should be treated, and the changes we need from systems, rather than continuing to focus on what is “wrong” with any one individual.
How We Tell Our Stories
When you explore our resources on this website, you might notice we often speak in a collective voice (“we”, “our”, “us”). You might wonder where the individual stories are.
We believe that for a human right to be real, it must be strong enough to hold all of us. Our approach to storytelling works on two levels:
The Individual Thread (Our Blogs)
Our Lived Experience writers share personal reflections, essays, and stories that “humanise” our vision, the CRPD, systemic barriers and more. These are the raw, unpolished moments of living with psychosocial disability or mental health challenges—the friction we face and the small moments of flow we fight for. These blogs allow you to meet the designers behind the work as individuals. [Explore the Blogs]
The Braided Narrative (Our Resources)
Our resources—like the Blueprint for Partnership and the Collective Good Life Vision—are not just clinical documents. They are a “braided narrative.” During our co-design process, we realised that while our mental health challenges or backgrounds were different, our systemic wounds and aspirations were often identical. We took our unique experiences and aspirations and looked for the patterns. Where one co-designer spoke of a cold reception desk, another spoke of a clinical intake form. Where one co-designer spoke of being silenced in a ward, another spoke of being excluded from their community. We wove these unique experiences into a single, powerful “Collective Story.” This allows us to speak to systems with a unified voice. When you read a resource on this site, you aren’t reading the opinion of an organisation; you are reading a “synthesis of truths” from 16 people who have lived it.
Finding Your Story in Our Collective Voice
You might not see your name on these pages, but we hope you see your experiences. A “Braided Narrative” works because while our specific details differ, our emotional truths are often the same.
To see if you connect with our vision, ask yourself if you recognise these patterns of Friction and Flow:
Do you recognise the Friction?
- Have you ever felt like you were just a “case to be managed” or a name on a checklist, rather than a person being welcomed into a space?
- Have you ever sat at a high reception desk and felt the physical barrier reflecting a power imbalance?
- Have you ever felt the “administrative hurdle” of repeating your trauma on redundant forms?
- Have you ever felt that the system’s schedule or rules were more important than your dignity?
If you recognise these moments, you are already part of the story that built our resources.
Do you desire the Flow?
We advocate for a world where systems are designed for consumers, not just for paperwork. We believe in a future:
- Where the person behind the desk has taken a moment to prepare for us specifically, so we feel seen, not just “processed”.
- Where the environment feels safe and welcoming—with natural light, chairs we can move, and quiet corners—rather than cold and clinical.
- Where we aren’t just following a “treatment plan” but leading the way toward our own version of a good life.
- Where human rights aren’t just words in a document, but something we feel in every interaction.
An Invitation to Connect
Connecting with our peer group is about matching our hopes for the future.
When we say “Making Rights Real” we are talking about international laws about human rights from the UNCRPD (the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) and bringing those rights down to earth and making them practical.
It means making sure those rights show up in the way a person speaks to us, the way a room is designed, and the way we are supported to make our own decisions.
We want to move from a system that asks, “What is wrong with you?” to a community that says, “You belong here”.
If this sounds like the world you want to live in, then our vision is something you can connect with.
How to use this site
This isn’t a mental health directory or a legal toolkit; it’s our contribution to building a human rights-based framework for systemic change.
Making Rights Real serves as a proof of concept for authentic co-design. It showcases a process entirely led by and for people with lived experience of mental health challenges, demonstrating that those who navigate the system can be architects for its transformation.
Whether you are here for yourself, a loved one, or as a professional, we invite you to use this content to:
For Peers
Access our Simple Guide to the UN CRPD and Personal Guide to Your Rights to help bridge the gap between your daily lived experiences and the international human rights standards Australia agreed to uphold.
For Service Providers & Community Organisations
By using the Warm Entry Protocol and Blueprint for Partnership, explore our ideas to shift from a system that simply ‘manages cases’ (processing mindset) to a practice that truly honours human rights and dignity (human rights affirming practices)
For Policymakers
Use our Understanding Barriers to a Good Life to identify some of the deep-seated mental models that Australia must address to align domestic policy with the UNCRPD.
For Carers, Family, and Kin
Discover more about supporting consumers’ right to self-determination and advocate for a good life that aligns with their inherent rights.
Who We Are
This project is a collaborative effort supported by the National Mental Health Consumer Alliance (the Alliance). The Alliance is an organisation of people with lived experience of mental health challenges, working for and with mental health consumers. We work closely with Community Mental Health Australia (CMHA) to deliver this project and share our findings widely, ensuring voices reach the places where change happens.
Begin the Journey
The first step is defining our destination. Explore our collective vision for a good life and learn the UNCRPD’s role in upholding our vision.
[Begin the Journey: Explore our Vision]
[Download the ‘North Star’ Blueprint]
Blogs
When the Front Door is the First Harm
One consumer’s account of what happens when the intake process becomes the first harm — and a direct illustration of why ‘respect as a clinical metric’ is not an abstract principle but an urgent, measurable standard.
The Velvet Rope of Pity
When we experience a difficult interaction – like being pitied or dismissed—we are only seeing the event (the tip of the iceberg above the water). But beneath that surface lie systemic structures (the rules, policies, and gatekeeping) and, at the very bottom, mental models (the deep-seated beliefs that drive everything else).
The following story by Nicola-Jane le Breton illustrates what happens when we look “beneath the waterline” of a single interaction with a General Medical Practitioner (GP).
The Partnership Revolution
On moving from a cage of protection to a safety net of support.
The Expert in the Room is Me
The following story illustrates what happens when we look “beneath the waterline” of a psychiatric diagnosis.
The 28-Day Constraint: How DSP Rules Undermine the Right to Global Movement (Article 18)
Why is financial security conditional on staying in one place? JH, our lived experience writers, highlights a significant systemic barrier: the 28-day DSP (Disability Support Pension) travel limit. This piece examines how such rigid constraints infringe upon the rights of mental health consumers, creating a system where essential financial security is traded for curtailed movement.
Marriage or Money: How the DSP Partner Rule Violates the Right to Safety (Article 23 and 28)
Marriage or Money: How the DSP Partner Rule Violates the Right to Safety (Article 23 and 28)Author: JH Article 23 of the UN Convention on