Singapore's Mental Health Peer Movement

What is it about?

Singapore’s mental health peer movement is a social movement that encourages persons with psychiatric histories to use their lived experience for the benefit of others. This is a rare state-led intervention designed to empower persons in recovery to advocate for themselves and exercise agency. However, in the context of a depoliticized society such as Singapore, the inherently political nature of this work—to articulate a shared identity, build community and awareness, and press for destigmatization and other forms of support—has become obscured, thereby muting the potential of the peer movement. This article discusses life-writing narratives as an opportunity to advance the re-politicization of mental health stories. I argue from an insider’s perspective that life-writing provides an opportunity within Singapore’s mental health landscape for a diverse range of stories to be told that may complicate dominant narratives in mental health.

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Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Here is why this paper matters—academically, politically, and ethically: The analysis shows that Singapore’s Mental Health Peer Movement, while framed as progressive and empowering, risks reproducing the very power structures it seeks to challenge. By being state-led and tightly integrated into existing psychiatric systems, peer advocacy becomes managed rather than emancipatory, limiting its capacity to question diagnosis, coercion, labour precarity, or policy priorities. In a depoliticized context that prioritizes social order and economic productivity, structural determinants of distress—such as inequality, precarity, and historical legacies of colonial governance—are rendered invisible. Lived experience is celebrated rhetorically but instrumentalized in practice, valued only insofar as it stabilizes the system and aligns with biomedical and policy logics. This not only constrains peer voices but also risks emotional extraction: peers are asked to disclose trauma while remaining grateful, compliant, and undercompensated. Situating contemporary peer work within Singapore’s colonial mental health history matters because it reveals continuity rather than rupture. The emphasis on discipline, functionality, and risk management persists, even as the language shifts to recovery and empowerment. Without this historical lens, reforms can appear humane while leaving foundational assumptions untouched. Life writing matters here as a counter-technology. Memoirs and auto/biographies allow peers to speak outside institutional scripts, reclaim narrative authority, and make visible the systemic conditions shaping lived experience. As a method, life writing bridges scholarship, advocacy, and public discourse, offering a way to re-politicize mental health without relying solely on policy channels. Ultimately, this matters because how societies recognize—or manage—lived experience shapes whose suffering counts, whose voices are heard, and whether mental health reform addresses symptoms alone or confronts the social and historical forces that produce distress in the first place.

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