“A Leader, That’s A Verb”: A Discursive Analysis of Lived Experience Leadership Per its Construction by People with Lived Experience

Abstract Lived experience leadership is championed as key to realising progressive change across the mental health sector. This article represents an effort to diminish the hermeneutical lacuna associated with lived experience leadership, and so redress an identified barrier to its advancement. Herein, we present an analytic account of the defining features of lived experience leadership. Interviews were conducted with 19 people identified by their peers as lived experience leaders regarding their views on lived experience leadership and related concepts such as power, authority, influence and leadership more generally. Per our discursive analysis of interview data, lived experience leadership is constituted by acts realised via the use of a specific type of power- people with lived experience’s experience-based and systems-informed knowledge of and fidelity to themselves as both individuals and as a collective- and directed towards increasing others’ access to this power. Results suggest how lived experience leadership might be distinguished from other similar practices, and may be utilised as a tool with which to promote its proliferation.