Operational-level grievance mechanisms are often viewed as a means to empower rightsholders to access remedy for human rights abuses. This article presents qualitative research findings on Kakuzi’s ‘Independent Human Rights Mechanism’, a mechanism specifically designed to provide remedy for human rights abuses. Kakuzi’s grievance mechanism takes place in the context of historical land injustices, whereby thousands of squatters are subject to practices of enclosure—territorial, legal and epistemic—that legitimate Kakuzi’s authority over the land.

The article takes an actor-oriented approach, following grievances across their full trajectory—from community members’ injurious experience, to those grievances heard by the mechanism, to representation of community grievances in corporate disclosure—while foregrounding the agency communities exercise in relation to the mechanism. The mechanism delimits which grievances are admissible and remediable. Communities dissent from this delimitation through various strategies. Corporate disclosure of grievances then distorts local realities.

In the face of ongoing welfare challenges, a wave of academic and policy thinking has advocated for recentring public policy around the principles and practices of relational welfare. The present paper argues that the potential of relational welfare can be further supported by sharper analytical understanding of its diverse potential forms and their varying key relational characteristics. To explore these priorities, the paper draws on sixty-one semi-structured interviews with thirty-six staff and twenty-five participants from sixteen UK Supported Employment services cast in a relational welfare mould. These grounded lived experiences highlight individuals’ universally positive experiences of these relational interventions, in contrast to past typical activation experiences, and the importance of a subset of Cottam’s relational welfare identifiers to those experiences. Rather than being homogeneous in their qualitative characteristics and requirements, the findings suggest legitimate variation in – and a hierarchical nesting of – relational welfare characteristics across more and less formalised relational interventions. Findings help to further critical understanding of relational welfare interventions and to support scholars and policy makers alike to maximise the reach, purity and potential of relational welfare approaches across diverse policy domains and approaches.

Experiences of healthcare services are an important indicator of quality and health system improvement. In correctional facilities, structural and contextual factors affect experiences of healthcare services and processes for voicing these experiences. This study explores barriers and opportunities for people in custody to voice their experiences of healthcare services in custody. We held four focus groups and one interview with people living in the community who had accessed, or tried to access, healthcare services while incarcerated in a provincial correctional facility in Ontario, Canada in the previous five years. Using template analysis, we developed four interacting themes related to expectations and experiences of healthcare, and of submitting complaints or asking for help: i) the system is not designed for healthcare, ii) gatekeeping and perceptions of ‘deserving’ healthcare, iii) impact of healthcare on other outcomes, and iv) calling the abyss. These factors affected perceptions of the potential efficacy of a patient feedback process, and how people in custody were likely to engage with it. Participants also identified five key features that should be components of any patient feedback processes. This study highlights challenges to patient-reported experiences of care in quality improvement work in restrictive environments and with incarcerated populations.

The study investigates the potential role that films may play in raising awareness and motivation to act for climate change mitigation. The study was conducted amongst middle school children based in Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh, India (n = 135). The selected students were classified into higher and lower exposure groups based on their level of exposure to climate vulnerabilities. All the participants were given an educational intervention through a short film designed to enhance the student’s understanding of climate change issues. Data were analysed using GLMM with fixed effects of time, exposure and their interaction. Knowledge increased significantly from pre- to post-test on all items (McNemar’s tests, all p < 0.001). Although both groups improved, gains were consistently larger in the high-exposure group. Model-predicted probabilities rose from 38.1%→52.5% in the lower-exposure group and from 33.1%→69.3% in the high-exposure group, a statistically significant 21.8 percentage-point greater gain for high-exposure students. The study demonstrates that film-based interventions have significantly improved climate knowledge among the middle-school students, with larger gains observed in those with higher lived exposure to climate vulnerabilities.

After a brief overview of tardive dyskinesia, this targeted narrative review will examine the psychosocial consequences of tardive dyskinesia on patients’ daily lives, including stigma, social withdrawal, and quality of life, as well as impact on physical functioning. The extant literature on the impact of tardive dyskinesia on patients and their caregivers is described and summarized, including how patients with tardive dyskinesia perceive the severity and impact of their motor symptoms and whether this aligns with clinical observations by their treaters.

This Editorial introduces the Special Issue of the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine focused on the evolution, implementation, and critique of the recovery approach in mental health. Tracing its roots to the 19th-century writings of John Perceval, a pioneer in lived experience advocacy, we outline how the recovery approach has grown into a global movement grounded in human rights, agency, and systemic transformation. We define the recovery approach and outline its values of shared humanity, justice, equality, respect, and compassion. We then discuss both the global progress made (including advances in peer support, Recovery Colleges, and coproduction in research, policy, and service development) and the significant challenges faced (ranging from tokenism and epistemic inequality to professionalisation and systemic resistance). The Editorial also explores tensions such as ‘neorecovery’, clinician uncertainty, and the co-optation of lived experience roles. We then provide a brief overview of the diverse contributions that comprise the Special Issue. Rather than romanticising the potential of lived experience integration, or celebrating marginal successes, we argue that, as a whole, this scholarly body of work illuminates pathways to mental health system reform and transformative change. These contributions help us inch closer to the promised revolution, a mental health system that has its foundations in equally valued clinical expertise, scientific rigour, and lived experience knowledge. Such a system would assist people that encounter psychological distress and mental illness, in all its forms, to not only heal but overcome, transcend, and flourish beyond suffering.

When returning to their communities after incarceration, individuals face elevated rates of mortality and other poor health outcomes. The reentry period provides a critical opportunity for interventions to improve health, but, historically, a prohibition on federal Medicaid coverage during incarceration has created barriers to care after release. To address these barriers, many states have applied for Medicaid section 1115 reentry waivers to expand access to Medicaid coverage for certain pre- and post-release services. These waivers present an important opportunity to improve care access during reentry, but, if driven by carceral entities, they run the risk of replicating carceral systems that harm health. This article advocates for an alternative approach: centering the perspectives of people with lived experience of incarceration in all aspects of waiver design, implementation, and evaluation. Drawing on personal and professional experience, the authors explore the value of centering lived experience in health policy and identify successes, challenges, and lessons learned from California’s waiver. This article also explores the importance of centering lived experience in information sharing and privacy practices in waiver implementation. Across these areas, waivers driven by lived experience can promote dignity, autonomy, and wellbeing, dismantling carceral approaches that reinforce stigma, erode trust, and perpetuate inequities.

This article explores violent extremism (VE) through an embodied, bottom-up lens, using body-mapping with Muslim women in Kenya. Drawing on two selected body maps, we critically interrogate the use of VE is as a framework for analysing the harm experienced by women. Our participants used the terminology of VE to refer to not only Al-Shabaab–related violence but also gender-based violence, gang violence, and state violence. These insights highlight a key tension in critical scholarship on VE: while often critiqued from a distance, VE is actively reappropriated by those most affected. We argue that, as a community disproportionately targeted by countering violent extremism (CVE) initiatives, our participants employed the language of VE as a form of adaptive resistance – challenging both the violent policing of CVE and the patriarchal violence embedded in their daily lives. This article contributes to feminist decolonial critiques of VE by centring the voices of those most impacted, and by questioning critiques that overlook lived experiences. Additionally, by sharing our arts-based methodology, we contribute to emerging literature on decolonial research practices. Finally, we raise critical questions about the intersections of gender-based violence, gang violence, state violence, and VE in Kenya and beyond.