Lived Experience: The Line Between Personal and ProfessionalLived Experience: The Line Between Personal and Professional
Addiction Medicine Made Easy
Dr Casey Grover and physician assistant Randall Law talk about how clinicians with lived experience of mental illness and addiction can share their stories without letting personal history steer patient care. Their discussion centres on dual diagnosis, empathy, boundaries and the daily work of staying mentally stable while practising in addiction medicine.
43:44•12 Oct 2026
Lived Experience in the Clinic: Where Your Story Helps—and Where It Hurts
Episode Overview
- Use personal history only when it clearly benefits the patient, not to meet the clinician’s own emotional needs.
- Frame shared stories as anecdote rather than evidence and state explicitly when you are speaking from personal experience.
- Channel lived experience into empathy and validation, especially with distressed or psychotic patients, rather than into persuasion.
- Monitor your own mental health with regular checks on temper, sleep, grandiosity and social stress, particularly in high-intensity addiction work.
- Recognise that sharing vulnerability can inspire others to seek help, but that detailed disclosure may sometimes unsettle patients and requires caution.
“"Am I doing this for my benefit or am I doing this for their benefit? And if it's for my benefit, okay, it's out."”
What makes a recovery story truly inspiring? Here, that story comes from both sides of the consultation room. Dr Casey Grover sits down with psychiatry physician assistant Randall Law to talk about the tricky balance between "I've been there" and "this is your care".
Randall works in residential and outpatient addiction treatment in Idaho, with a strong focus on dual diagnosis, and brings his own history of severe mental health struggles into the conversation – including a manic psychosis episode that ended with him walking barefoot across Hawaii and nearly dying in the ocean. As he puts it, the title of his book, *Ember Adrift*, reflects being "adrift, but still being a bright ember with potential to recover".
The episode looks at how lived experience can build instant trust and reduce shame, but also how it can quietly skew judgement if a clinician starts thinking, "this is how it was for me, therefore this is how it must be for everyone".
Randall shares the two questions he uses before mentioning his own past: "Am I doing this for my benefit or am I doing this for their benefit?" and "Am I trying to use this to cause a behavioural change directly?" If the answer points towards his own needs or manipulation, he keeps quiet.
You’ll hear practical ideas for sharing personal history carefully, like flagging when something is anecdote rather than science and explicitly stating, "on a personal note, I'm going to share something about myself to help us understand this". Randall also talks through his daily self-checks on temper, sleep, grandiosity and social stress, showing how a clinician in recovery can stay safe while working in a high-pressure addiction setting.
If you’ve ever wondered how much of your own story to bring into the room – whether as a clinician, peer supporter or person in recovery – this conversation might prompt you to ask: who is my story really for?
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