The third place

Community

Recovery is something we do with each other.

A selfie of Matthew with a smiling group around tables at Delapre Abbey, many of them waving
With a community group at Delapre Abbey, Northampton, 2022.
Matthew smiling beside an Action for Happiness stand, with a banner reading Creating a happier world together
With Action for Happiness Northamptonshire, 2023.
A selfie of Matthew in sunglasses outside a café with Clare Balding and two others, one of them in a wheelchair giving a thumbs-up
Around Pitsford Reservoir with Nick Wilson, the Disabled Adventurer, a fellow veteran, and Clare Balding, recording Ramblings for BBC Radio 4, 2023.

LERO Coordinator

The Forward Trust, North Northamptonshire, since July 2026

A Lived Experience Recovery Organisation is recovery run by the people who’ve lived it. I support their development across the county. The people who come forward are experts by experience, and the culture gets set in how we treat each other. I’m also on ImROC’s LERO mentoring programme, and a member and volunteer of Community Recovery, a distinct organisation here with its own leaders. The Forward Trust works with addiction and criminal justice, and recovery here means addiction, criminal justice, homelessness and mental health in the same room, because that’s how they come, in one person. In Chiba I spoke on bipolar and substance use. It’s ground I know.

A selfie of Matthew with three of the Chase Recovery team outside a stone house, all smiling
North Wales, with the Chase Recovery team, 2026.

Expert by Experience

West and North Northamptonshire Councils, since April 2026

Co-production. Adult social care asks people with lived experience in to help shape its services, and I’m one of them. I’ve worked the same way with Northamptonshire Mind, Mental Health Northants Collaboration and Voluntary Impact Northamptonshire.

Lived Experience Council

International Society for Bipolar Disorders, since November 2025

People who live with bipolar, working with researchers and clinicians around the world on education, research and clinical care. It followed Chiba, where Dr Andrea Vassilev gave me the chance to apply and I spoke about bipolar and substance use.

Matthew and Dr Andrea Vassilev smiling in a covered shopping street in Japan, paper autumn leaves overhead
In Japan, with my friend Dr Andrea Vassilev, September 2025.
Matthew between Dr Michael Ostacher and Dr Bryan Tolliver, all three in conference lanyards, Matthew with a presenter ribbon
With Dr Michael Ostacher and Dr Bryan Tolliver at the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, Chiba, September 2025.
Matthew smiling against a brick wall, holding up Andrea Vassilev’s workbook Beyond the Bipolar Label
My signed copy of Beyond the Bipolar Label, 2026. I was a beta reader.

Peer support

Intentional Peer Support practitioner, ImROC Peer Support Worker

It moved me from what’s wrong with you to what happened to you. More a relationship than a service. Trained in Intentional Peer Support and ImROC, with my own Wellness Recovery Action Plan. What lingers is the feeling of sitting in a room with people who share a quiet, intuitive understanding.

Before all this

  • 2022–26Action for Happiness Northamptonshire: volunteer, board member, hub coordinator, positive psychology trainer, and a community of practice that reflected its insights back in the moment.
  • 2025–26Research Champion with Mental Health Northants Collaboration, and Project Specialist with Northamptonshire Mind.
  • 2015–17Co-facilitating the Bipolar UK peer support group in Northampton.
  • 2009–11ArtBlast, student volunteers taking the arts out into the town.
  • 2008–10Northampton Arts Collective, and the campaign that kept the Fishmarket Gallery alive.

What I keep saying

Recovery is a narrower word than the life it names. In drug and alcohol services it shrinks to one substance or one behaviour, and the isolation that was there before the substance doesn’t leave with it. A recovery organisation run by people who’ve lived it takes the whole person, because that’s who turns up.

We say we’re building organisations when what we’re doing is growing communities. What makes a LERO isn’t its shape, constituted or not, funded or not. It’s who holds it: people with lived experience, organising themselves to support the recovery of others.

Men’s mental health, suicide, stigma. The silence I was first diagnosed into is still out there, and men are still dying in it. I say so wherever I’m given a microphone.

We are neither broken nor fixed; we’re in motion. Recovery doesn’t come from interventions delivered at us. It happens with each other, so the people who use a service belong in the room where it’s designed. Co-production, not consultation, and lived experience leading where it can.

What I write here is my own, and doesn’t speak for any organisation I work with.