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Chris White
Lived Experience Mental Health Advocate
Chris has over 20 years’ experience of working with Scottish mental health organisations. During that time, he has worked in front line services, peer support, service delivery, training, and research. For the last 10 years he has worked with the Mental Health Foundation (UK) as Citizenship and Participation Officer. Areas of interest include stigma, mental health disclosure, recovery, health inequalities, long term conditions and the intersect between emergency services and mental health in distress and crisis.
Past experiences of mental health treatment, accessing services and living with a mental health condition have a big influence on his work. Now over 50, he has personal experiences of other long-term physical health conditions that have impacted on his life, some of which can partly be attributed to the complexities of how we manage physical health conditions while living with an enduring mental health condition.
With social connection at the heart of his wellbeing, outside of work he prioritises family and friends, not taking himself seriously, and looking forward to Christmas “I spent so many Christmases in hospital or crisis, then in recovery, rather than have that time as an unavoidable trigger, I choose to embrace it and reclaim it as my own”.
