Presentations

As a mental health, suicide prevention employment services lived experience consumer and carer of a neurodivergent adult with complex physical and mental health challenges, we have navigated these systems over many years. Our lived experience has revealed how deeply they shape the lives of people with chronic illness, trauma histories, and neurodiversity, often in ways that do not reflect the realities of those they are designed to support.
The journey through employment and support services has exposed persistent gaps, including limited understanding of fluctuating or intersecting health needs and a lack of tailored, flexible approaches. For carers, the additional responsibilities of advocacy, coordination, and emotional labour are amplified by systems that can feel rigid, inconsistent, or difficult to access. Neurodiversity further compounds these challenges, highlighting the need for approaches that recognise cognitive, sensory, and communication differences.
A broader context emerges from decades of consumer and carer storytelling, which has become a powerful catalyst for challenging stigma, promoting trauma informed and recovery oriented care, and centring personhood in service design.
“Nothing about us without us” continues to drive interdisciplinary collaboration and coproduction across employment services, community settings, clinical and nonclinical practice, policy and research.
Flexible, person centred practice, empathetic communication, recognition of the lived experiences with psychosocial disabilities and genuine partnerships with employment services is critical to improving engagement of this underrecognized group of people.
By challenging the prevailing framework of “mutual obligation” in favor of “meaningful engagement a deeper understanding among service providers about the complexities that older women experience can bring meaningful change for individuals to be able to live fuller lives and contribute to society.