Chan Li Shan invites us to explore how life writing — autobiographies, memoirs, and biographies — can build solidarity among persons with lived experience of mental health issues in Singapore. Drawing from the reconstructed fragments of an unnamed asylum inmate in colonial Singapore, her presentation reflects on sending care and healing across time, genders, and ways of life.

She argues that speaking, sharing, and listening to lived experience stories are not merely personal acts but acts of citizenship — forms of connection, belonging, and participation in community. Life writing, she suggests, can challenge dominant biomedical frameworks, legitimize lived experience as knowledge, and re-politicize Singapore’s mental health landscape.

Chan Li Shan recently completed her PhD in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, with research focused on life writing and mental health in Singapore and Southeast Asia. She is the author of three life writing books, including a memoir of schizophrenia, and currently serves a Lived Experience Commissioner with The Lancet Psychiatry.

Discussant
Diana Rose, Australian National University