On Living Experience with Emergency Mental Health: Sarah's Story

In this deeply personal and candid conversation, Vijay sits down with their friend "Sarah" (a pseudonym to protect her privacy), a trans woman with lived experience navigating systemic barriers in mental health care.
Recorded in an intimate setting, this episode explores Sarah’s mental health journey and her firsthand experiences with emergency services, psychiatric wards, and crisis lines. She shares how systemic underfunding, lack of training, and resource shortages shaped her care, and how individual acts of compassion by staff often weren’t enough to overcome structural problems.
Through Sarah’s story, listeners will hear the cracks in our mental health systems, the ways they fall short, and the human resilience it takes to navigate them. Despite hardship, Sarah emphasizes that the people working within these systems care deeply and it’s the systems themselves that need transformation.
If you want to better understand the realities of mental health care from the perspective of someone directly affected, this episode is for you.
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