One of the biases around mental health, particularly in the U.S. and Canada, is that we presume that we can label others — that it’s okay for us to choose the label we then apply to others. We foreground our perceptions and judgments over people’s personal preferences on how they want to be referred to and how they want to identify.

One of the best ways that we can foreground the person and not their illness, as well as recognize who the expert is and who has the most knowledge around their own mental health, is the very neutral language around experience.

So for example, rather than saying, “Neena has depression,” instead we might say, “Neena is a person with lived experience of depression.” The word “experience” can be really powerful.