Does having experienced mental-health difficulties, distress, diagnosis, counselling, or hospitalization mean we share common interests?
Does someone who has benefited from psychiatric services share advocacy goals with someone harmed by them?
Do we need a common position before we can act together?
If we differ, what exactly are we temporarily becoming a "we" around?
How do education, class, language skills, occupation, diagnosis, the nature or severity of distress, and relationships with institutions shape someone's position in a community?
As someone gains access to institutions, media, and academic spaces, how does their relationship with other qinlizhe change?
Who is most likely to be invited by institutions to act as a "qinlizhe representative"? Who decides which experiences deserve to be heard?
Where are the people who can't hold down steady work, attend meetings regularly, or express themselves fluently; who have no academic qualifications, are in crisis, or don't want to disclose their identities?
Why do some stories enter the media, research, funding applications, and public advocacy more easily than others?
Is a story still welcome when it's messy, contradictory, angry, and has no recovery ending?
When does shared experience connect us, and when does it start concealing differences in power between us?
Who can represent whom?
Why are qinlizhe so often asked to choose one person to "represent the qinlizhe voice"?
Whom can a person represent besides themselves?
Is "I'm a qinlizhe too" enough to justify speaking for others?
How do we distinguish having first-hand experience from having a mandate to represent others?
If there is no unified "qinlizhe voice," how should we advocate?
When experience starts to become "valuable"
As the mental-health sector places more value on first-hand experience, should we be pleased, or stay alert?
Why is a researcher's analysis "professional labour," while qinlizhe telling their life stories is so often "participation" or a "contribution"?
When should qinlizhe be paid?
Does a person have the right to say, "You may listen to my story, but you may not use it"?
Who holds the rights to edit, interpret, receive credit for, and make final decisions about a story?
The qinlizhe who gets "recognized"
When someone's suffering enters a research report, funding application, documentary, or institution's publicity, who gains what?
When some qinlizhe feel recognized and satisfied within existing arrangements, how do we avoid treating their experiences as proof that those arrangements are already good enough?
Once someone becomes a more visible "model qinlizhe," does their relationship with other qinlizhe change?
When a qinlizhe gains more resources and opportunities than others, does that relative advantage create responsibilities towards the community? If so, what responsibilities? If not, why not?
When the exposure, resources, and opportunities to speak someone receives still feel insufficient to them, but already far exceed what other qinlizhe receive, how should they understand and respond to others' expectations?
Collaboration, or co-option?
When qinlizhe work in mental-health institutions, are they changing the institution, or being changed by it?
How can we tell whether a collaboration expands qinlizhe power or lends legitimacy to the existing system?
Within a system or institution, who decides which views are "practical" and which are "too radical"?
Can improving mental-health services and questioning psychiatry itself coexist?
When being heard and praised by hospitals and psychiatrists is treated as a major victory, are we expanding qinlizhe power, or still believing our voices only matter once professionals recognize them?
When qinlizhe enter a hospital's partnership arrangements, is the hospital lending legitimacy to their work, or is their participation lending legitimacy to the hospital?
Could institutional recognition come at the cost of distancing oneself from qinlizhe deemed less "respectable"?
Does the existence of "good qinlizhe" help the system produce "bad qinlizhe" it needn't listen to?
Must those who collaborate with institutions and those who refuse treat one another as enemies?
Can we enter a system while retaining the ability to leave it, refuse it, and criticize it?
When we hurt one another
Have I ever assumed that "people who have been hurt should know better than to hurt others"?
Why doesn't shared oppression automatically make a community safe?
Why can harm from another qinlizhe be harder to make sense of than harm from a professional?
Can "they're a qinlizhe too" become a reason not to hold someone accountable?
When we share our position sincerely, and someone seems to agree but later makes choices that conflict with it, how should we understand that gap? How do we decide whether to keep trusting and working with them?
When someone responds to our stories with sympathy, emotion, even tears, but doesn't turn that feeling into reflection on and accountability for their own position, actions, and consequences, can we still call it care?
What is a disagreement in position, what is a relationship breaking down, and what is actual harm? Are they the same?
How do we distinguish different aims, conflicting interests, limited capacity, broken trust, and malice?
When a former companion joins an institution or undertaking at odds with your principles, do you feel betrayed?
What has gone unsaid behind betrayal, resentment, and dissatisfaction?
Should every conflict be resolved through "communication"? Is every relationship worth repairing?
Who does the work of keeping a community going?
Who replies to messages late at night? Who comforts someone falling apart? Who mediates conflict?
Who takes minutes, handles registrations and reimbursements, sends reminders, and deals with the aftermath?
When does "peer support" become labour without boundaries?
Does someone involved in collective action have the right to put their own life, work, studies, and rest before the community?
If a project depends on one person's continual self-sacrifice, is it really a good community?
Should caring for a community also mean allowing people to leave it?
Money
What changes when money enters a qinlizhe community?
When well-resourced corporations or hospitals say they have no budget to pay qinlizhe, do they really lack money, or has qinlizhe labour simply not been prioritized as worth paying for?
When an institution says "there's no budget," why is there money for other things, such as expert fees or printing, while qinlizhe labour is expected for free?
When some qinlizhe accept unpaid work for large corporations or hospitals, could they unintentionally give institutions a reason to keep using other qinlizhe for free?
Which qinlizhe are better placed to afford "unpaid participation"? Can their choices narrow the space for others to demand payment?
Silence, refusal, and leaving
Is speaking out always more powerful than silence?
Is keeping one's diagnosis private an entirely reasonable choice?
Can I join an action but refuse to tell my story?
Can I accept support but refuse to become an advocate?
Can I be public once and later choose not to be?
Can I leave a community I once actively helped build?
Can refusing collaboration itself be a form of action?
Can we build a way of acting together that doesn't require us to keep proving we're "brave enough to speak out"?
What if we don't have to be united?
Does a community need a shared identity?
Must we like one another to act together?
Does collaboration require intimacy?
Can we be allies on just one thing?
What should be made clear before collaboration begins?
How do we establish workable ways to leave, rather than merely saying "you can leave at any time"?
How can we make refusal, withdrawal, and disagreement possible without punishing people through their relationships?
Can a project allow participants to reach conclusions entirely different from the initiator's?
Can a qinlizhe community accommodate irreconcilable positions?
Can we let go of the fantasy of "building a united community" and pursue more limited, specific, honest collaborations?
If a community isn't always reliable, how can we protect ourselves without giving up entirely on acting with others?