Feelings of fraudulence re: lived experience and working in mental health

Hi everyone,

I grew up with experiences of anxiety and depression, panic attacks in my late teens and throughout my twenties. I experienced suicidal ideation on and off and was passively suicidal for a few years. This year I had a three week hospital admission and was told I had experienced psychosis - to be honest, I still struggle to understand it as psychosis. It doesn't really fit with my experience. They also slapped BPD on me at one point. My experience had some pretty traumatic moments.

I study social work and am currently doing an internship in a mental health service. There is a big emphasis on lived experience in the org that I am in, which I think is amazing. I am learning about mad studies, consumer academics etc.

Whilst I have lived experience, I was not in and out of the system for years and was not sedated with depot medication, restrained or secluded. Obviously, this is a good thing. But as my experience is all fairly recent and because of these factors I feel like a fraud. At one level, there's a conflict between social workers and lived experience staff but I sort of sit with both. Although my trauma is not so entrenched and extreme as some, I have had some lived and living experience of mental health. But I am also still an emerging practitioner, unsure of myself and my practice.

I know I should count myself lucky but I sometimes feel that my experience is not valid or is just so vastly different from those who have been abused or institutionalized that it doesn't count.

I also struggle to grapple with my mental distress because I am white, middle class and haven't experienced certain ACEs or whatever frameworks you want to use. Idk, a lot of my trauma feels like a grey area. I realise there's this idea that we all share this humanness and anyone can have what is framed as mental "illness" but it seems true to me that so much of this is shaped by what happens to us at a structural level and I just...don't really have those experiences? Idk, I guess it's just a way of trying to understand why I am "broken".

This all doesn't really make much sense but I needed to get it off my chest. Feel free to share any thoughts or not. Love and solidarity