04/02/2026
Journal of Humanistic Psychology Call for Papers
Special Issue on: Understanding and Upholding Authenticity in Peer /Lived and Living Experience Workforces (Abstracts due July 1, 2026)
Guest Editors: Byrne, Evans, Roper, Edwards, Roennfeldt, Martinez Laing, Myrick, Pullen, Chapman, & Bellamy.
In recent years, peer support and the broader Lived and Living experience workforce have expanded dramatically across mental health, substance use, and related health and social service systems. Increasingly designated Lived and Living Experience roles are being employed in support services and beyond. Designated roles have two distinct perspectives and ways of working and are informed by either:
1. Personal first-hand, life-changing or defining experiences with significant distress and adversity, service use or attempts to access services, periods of healing/personal recovery; or
2. Life-changing or defining experiences supporting someone with significant distress and adversity, service use or attempts to access services, periods of healing/personal recovery (Byrne et al., 2021).
When we refer to Lived and Living Experience workforce roles, practice and concepts, capitals are used to differentiate between the professional i.e. working from the perspective of our built Lived Expertise, and the individual – people who have lived experience but have not built that knowledge base into a primary perspective to inform job roles.
Lived and Living experience experts are now employed across the continuum, from informal mutual aid and community-rooted initiatives to clinical service delivery, research, organizational and executive leadership, and policy development.
At the same time, Lived Experience researchers and scholars are increasingly shaping the production of knowledge itself. Experiential expertise is not simply a workforce credential; it is a distinct epistemology—an approach to understanding suffering, recovery, healing, power, and systems change grounded in lived and living realities.
As peer and Lived Experience roles become more institutionalized, critical questions emerge:
• How do we move from simply integrating lived experience into existing systems toward transforming systems from a place of authenticity?
• How can experiential expertise be centered not only in service delivery, but in research design, theory-building, implementation, and evaluation?
• How is knowledge generated, validated, and sustained throughout the continuum of Lived and Living experience work?
While the evidence base for peer/Lived Experience work continues to grow—demonstrating improvements in hope, activation, engagement, and recovery outcomes—less attention has been paid to how authenticity is defined, operationalized, protected, and reproduced over time. When Lived and Living experience expertise is marginalized, co-opted, or narrowly professionalized, the consequences can include role drift, erosion of mutuality, epistemic injustice, workforce burnout, and dilution of the social movement roots of peer work.
Across settings, accredited training remains variable; the knowledge base of Lived and Living experience experts is often misunderstood or undervalued by non-peer colleagues; and peer/Lived experience researchers frequently navigate academic environments that do not fully recognize experiential knowledge as legitimate scholarship.
The Journal of Humanistic Psychology editorial team is inviting submissions for a special issue of the journal focused on Understanding and Upholding Authenticity in Peer /Lived and Living Experience Workforces
This special issue invites contributions that critically examine how authenticity can be sustained and advanced across Lived and Living experience workforces and in Lived Experience–led research. We are particularly interested in scholarship that moves beyond inclusion toward cohesion—work that demonstrates how experiential knowledge is generated, shared, refined, and embedded throughout systems, organizations, communities, and research enterprises. We are calling on you to share with us some of the cutting-edge, innovative and/or collaborative approaches that explore:
• How Lived and Living experience experts shape practice, policy, and research across the full continuum
• Pathways for moving from symbolic inclusion to authentic leadership and knowledge generation
• Community-engaged, survivor-/Mad-/Lived Experience–led research methodologies
• The development of theoretical frameworks grounded in lived experience
• Strategies for sustaining authenticity amid professionalization, funding mandates, and policy shifts
• How experiential expertise is cultivated, transmitted, supervised, and evaluated
• Challenges in defining what is ‘authentic’, particularly in relation to respecting multiple perspectives, intersectionality, and across different settings and countries, who decides, and what gives them the authority?
• Strategies, initiatives and interventions to protect and maintain authentic peer work
• Examples of innovative approaches in peer support and other Lived Experience roles
• Risk factors for 'co-optation of peer and Lived Experience workers and researchers
• Benefits and challenges of co-production – how authenticity is impacted by colleagues and/or management in non-peer roles
• Models for ensuring that knowledge generated by Lived Experience experts informs workforce standards, organizational culture, and system transformation
• Tensions between institutionalization and social movement origins—and how these tensions can be navigated generatively
• Challenges to authenticity of the roles, particularly in environments that are not peer-led (i.e.: mainstream organizations and services that employ peers as part of a multi-disciplinary workforce)
• The role of training (for peers and/or non-peers) in defining and maintaining authentic peer work
Submissions may examine workforce development, training, supervision, governance, co-production, implementation science, intersectionality, identity formation, epistemic justice, evaluation methods, and effectiveness research—particularly when grounded in the voices and leadership of Lived and Living experience experts.
Submission Guidelines
Interested authors are asked to submit an Abstract (max 350-500 words) directly to us c/o abstract managing editor, Graziela Reis graziela.reis@yale.edu due by July 1, 2026. Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors to ensure that submissions are aligned with the topic of the special issue. Decisions will be made shortly thereafter. If accepted, authors will be invited to submit a Full Manuscript for the special issue: Due by November 30, 2026. Authors will receive instruction on how to submit the full manuscript through the online portal used for Journal of Humanistic Psychology submissions. The special issue is expected to be published in 2027.
We welcome all submissions and strongly encourage contributions from peer/Lived Experience/survivor/Mad scholars, practitioners, and researchers, as well as collaborators from adjacent disciplines. For this special issue, we are particularly interested in manuscripts that center lived and living experience perspectives in meaningful and substantive ways. We encourage teams to include Peer/Lived Experience researchers and/or workers in leading authorship roles, including first authorship. Submissions in which multiple—and preferably the majority—of authors identify as Lived and Living experience researchers and/or workforce members will be prioritized in the review process.
When abstracts are sent, and later if abstracts are accepted, we ask that you include a statement on the positionality of each author. This will not be published or shared, this is to aid our internal processes only. By positionality we mean – what primary perspective does each author speak from?
For example – some people work or have worked primarily from the perspective of their Lived Expertise in a designated peer/Lived Experience role, others may have lived experience but are primarily employed in and work from the perspective of another profession (e.g. psychologist, mental health nurse etc.), some people will not identify as having lived experience.
Submissions should contain original work that has not previously been published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors should follow the journal's regular guidelines, as published in every issue of the journal.
We welcome both short commentary pieces (5 pages or less) as well as full articles (25 pages). Papers should be no longer than 25 pages (including references, tables, etc.) Please indicate in your abstract the proposed form of your contribution.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page for full information about manuscript submission policies.
Guest Editors: Byrne, Evans, Roper, Edwards, Roennfeldt, Martinez Laing, Myrick, Pullen, Chapman, & Bellamy.
Please direct all queries ad Abstracts for this special issue our abstract managing editor, Graziela Reis: graziela.reis@yale.edu
Editorial Team for this Special Issue:
Louise Byrne, PhD, Ma (hons)
Founder and CEO, Lived Experience Training
louise@livedexperiencetraining.org
&
Assistant Professor Adjunct in Psychiatry
Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry
Program for Recovery and Community Health
Erector Square 319 Peck Street, Bldg. 1 New Haven, CT 06513
louise.byrne@yale.edu
Chyrell D Bellamy, PhD, MSW
Professor of Psychiatry
Director, Program for Recovery and Community Health
Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry
Program for Recovery and Community Health
Erector Square 319 Peck Street, Bldg. 1 New Haven, CT 06513
chyrell.bellamy@yale.edu
Editors:
Megan Evans, PhD, MS
Associate Research Scientist
Program for Recovery and Community Health
Yale School of Medicine
Megan.evans@yale.edu
Cath Roper, BA, DipEd, MA SocHlth
Senior Consumer Academic,
Centre for Mental Health Nursing
Department of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences
Alan Gilbert Building/Level 6/ 161 Barry Street,
The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia
&
Co-founder, Athena Workforce Consulting
https://www.athenacwc.com.au/
Helena Roennfeldt, MSW, PhD
Lived Experience Research Consultant
Research & Advocacy
Mind Australia
PO Box 5107, Burnley VIC 3121
Helena.Roennfeldt@mindaustralia.org.au
Jonathan P. Edwards, PhD, LCSW, ACSW, NYCPS
CEO, Jonathan Edwards Consulting
&
Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry
Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry
Program for Recovery and Community Health
Erector Square 319 Peck Street, Bldg. 1 New Haven, CT 06513
jonathanedwardsphd@gmail.com
Taina B. Martinez-Laing, MSW
Chief Executive Officer
Baltic Street Wellness Solutions, (Formerly Baltic Street AEH, Inc.)
9 Bond Street 3rd Fl. Brooklyn, NY 11201
tlaing@balticstreet.org
Keris Jän Myrick, M.B.A., M.S., Ph.D. (ABD)
Certified Personal Medicine Coach, CPMC
Podcast Host - Unapologetically Black Unicorns
kerismyrick@gmail.com
Felecia Pullen, Ph.D.
Let's Talk SAFETY, Inc./The PILLARS and SAFE in Harlem
fpullen@lets-talk-safety.org
Melissa Chapman, MPsych (Ind & Org), PhD
Lived Experience Researcher, Lived Experience Training
Melissa@livedexperiencetraining.org
&
Research Assistant, Department of Management and Marketing
Business School, La Trobe University
Plenty Road, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia 3086
M.Chapman@latrobe.edu.au
About The Journal:
The Journal of Humanistic Psychology is an interdisciplinary forum for contributions, controversies and diverse statements pertaining to humanistic psychology. It addresses personal growth, interpersonal encounters, social problems and philosophical issues.
An international journal of human potential, self-actualization, the search for meaning and social change, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology was founded by Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich in 1961.
Editor: Sarah R. Kamens, PhD; https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jhp
The Journal of Humanistic Psychology (JHP) is an interdisciplinary forum for contributions, controversies and diverse statements pertaining to humanistic psychology. It addresses personal growth, interpersonal encounters, social problems and philosophical issues. An international journal of human po...
