Lived Experience and the Limits (and Possibilities) of Empathy

With increasing pressure to give voice to 'lived experience', the field of mental health needs methods for addressing subjective experience, especially that which is stigmatised or compromised by its labelling.Arts and humanities provide rich techniques for describing the texture and transmission of experience, and for theorising the emotional complexities of 'knowledge exchange'.But do we have a disciplinary configuration up to the practical tasks of stigma reduction and empathy cultivation?For me, this is a pressing social challenge for Cultural Studies as an engaged, adaptive, post-disciplinary space, not only for thinking and analysis but for active intervention.