As part of the Association for Research in the Voluntary and Community Sector’s (ARVAC) Annual Lecture series, Shaping Our Lives Chair Peter Beresford delivered a presentation on the importance of first-hand experience in constructing knowledge and contributing to research and policy. Peter explains that mental health service users’ own direct experience and their interpretations and understandings of it have largely been ignored, devalued or marginalized in the past, but that as mental health service users have developed their own discussions, organisations, movement and collective action, it has become apparent that their views of themselves and the world are wildly discrepant from the medicalised ones that have dominated public discussion. Peter makes the case for this first-hand experience playing a key role in the formation of policy and the construction of knowledge, and explains the barriers that stand in its way and how they might be overcome.