My research focusses on resisting dominant narratives in mental health, to make space for a diverse range of stories.
I am especially interested to interrogate and examine the subject of support given to persons diagnosed with mental illness in Singapore’s mental health landscape. In particular, how professionals, caregivers, and policymakers have good intentions and are well-meaning, but persons diagnosed with mental illness continue to be diminished and disadvantaged.
My conviction is that the humanities—history, philosophy, and ordinary stories of lived experience—provide insightful and productive lenses to see differently the primarily medicalized and scientized concepts of mental illness and mental health. I believe in traversing traditional boundaries between disciplines and modes of inquiry.
My journal article on Singapore’s peer movement has been published by the Transcultural Psychiatry journal in Sage. This paper shows that Singapore’s Mental Health Peer Movement, while framed as progressive and empowering, risks reproducing the very power structures it seeks to challenge. By being state-led and tightly integrated into existing psychiatric systems, peer advocacy becomes managed rather than emancipatory, limiting its capacity to question diagnosis, coercion, labour precarity, or policy priorities.
In a depoliticized context that prioritizes social order and economic productivity, structural determinants of distress—such as inequality, precarity, and historical legacies of colonial governance—are rendered invisible. Lived experience is celebrated rhetorically but instrumentalized in practice, valued only insofar as it stabilizes the system and aligns with biomedical and policy logics. This not only constrains peer voices but also risks emotional extraction: peers are asked to disclose trauma while remaining grateful, compliant, and undercompensated.
Situating contemporary peer work within Singapore’s colonial mental health history matters because it reveals continuity rather than rupture. The emphasis on discipline, functionality, and risk management persists, even as the language shifts to recovery and empowerment. Without this historical lens, reforms can appear humane while leaving foundational assumptions untouched.
Life writing matters here as a counter-technology. Memoirs and auto/biographies allow peers to speak outside institutional scripts, reclaim narrative authority, and make visible the systemic conditions shaping lived experience. As a method, life writing bridges scholarship, advocacy, and public discourse, offering a way to re-politicize mental health without relying solely on policy channels.
Ultimately, this matters because how societies recognize—or manage—lived experience shapes whose suffering counts, whose voices are heard, and whether mental health reform addresses symptoms alone or confronts the social and historical forces that produce distress in the first place.
Please click on the links to explore in these areas in more detail below, and to view the outputs of my work, including op-eds, publications, and presentations.
LIVED EXPERIENCE AS A SOURCE AND FORM OF KNOWLEDGE
THE DUALITY OF PSYCHIATRY TO HEAL AND TO HARM
FAMILY NARRATIVES OF THE DISENFRANCHISED
EMPLOYMENT FOR PERSONS DIAGNOSED WITH MENTAL ILLNESS
Current Work
LIVED EXPERIENCE AS A SOURCE AND FORM OF KNOWLEDGE
Lived experience perspectives have not been sufficiently recognised as legitimate sources of knowledge in Singapore and elsewhere in Asia. And yet lived experience perspectives ought to be recognised as equally important as provider perspectives. Such knowledges may pull in different directions, but this necessary pulling is ultimately a strength. Knowledge can be interdisciplinary, which allows for work that combines disparate disciplines, and the possibility of collaborative work. Work can be both academic and non-academic. Differences–sex, gender, race, class, and age—allow for a multi-faceted range of perspectives that feed into discussions relevant to mental health researchers.
Publications
“Singapore’s Mental Health Peer Movement”, Transcultural Psychiatry, 2026;0(0). doi:10.1177/13634615251409682
Presentations
“Working Together for Greater Social Justice in Singapore’s Mental Health Landscape: A Methodological Framework for User Research”, Panel Speaker, 27th International Congress of the Pacific Rim College of Psychiatrists and 20th Malaysian Conference of Psychological Medicine, Kuala Lumpur, 2023.
“A Short History of Peer Movements in Singapore”, Speaker, Decolonizing Mental Health in Asia event, University of Keio, Japan, 2022.
“Rewriting Health Narratives”, National Library Board, Singapore. Panellist, 2023.
THE DUALITY OF PSYCHIATRY TO HEAL AND TO HARM
The duality of healing and harming consists of complexities concerning cure vs confinement, as well as the medical vs custodial aspects of mental health. This is reflected in the idea of a psychiatric hospital as being a place of care and healing, but also a place of confinement and coercion, like a prison. In my work, I think about how mental healthcare providers can promote healing and minimise harming in their processes and practices. Further, how might policymakers dealing with mental health legislation and policy balance legal, clinical, and ethical aspects when working with a person suspected of or diagnosed with mental illness? In 2024, I published an op-ed piece with Jom on this subject.
Op-ed and presentations
Chan, Li Shan. ‘I Object: Mental Illness Is Not a Crime’. Jom, 2024. https://www.jom.media/i-object-mental-illness-is-not-a-crime/
“Ecologies of Mental Health” Panel Speaker, Singapore Writers Festival, Singapore, 2024.
FAMILY NARRATIVES OF THE DISENFRANCHISED
In Singapore, state policies are family-oriented and pronatalist, which links to housing and social subsidies. Given the strong role of the biological family, where the state encourages family to be the first resort for support needed, the family is expected to support the person diagnosed with mental illness, financially and emotionally. But many families are not just the source of mental distress, but have abandoned their loved ones with chronic mental illness. In my research, I seek to explore the role of chosen families in supporting persons diagnosed with mental illness. I am seeking to develop a module in psychosocial rehabilitation for the education of mental health community-based providers.
DECOLONISING MENTAL HEALTH
Decolonising mental health can mean different things to different people. For me, the connections between coloniality and psychiatry are important to understand, especially issues of power dynamics and the objectification and classification of the patient in mental health practices. In addition, my work emphasises the importance of location-specific approaches to mental health and a pressing need to connect the past with the present. I am currently doing this work as a Commissioner with the Lancet Psychiatry Lived Experience Commission and Associate of King’s College London and Traumascapes, UK.
See: https://www.livedexperiencecommission.org
Presentations
“Transplanting the European Asylum: Contesting 1841 as Singapore’s Turning Point from Incarceration to Custodial Care in the History of Colonial Psychiatry”, Social Studies of Medicine Writing and Publishing Workshop, Hong Kong, 2024.
Past Work
MENTAL HEALTH STIGMA
In 2016, I did a landscape mapping of 15 organisations in Singapore doing mental health public education work. I found that most organisations were focussed on reducing stigma and promoting help-seeking or preventing mental illness. There seemed to be a clear gap: campaigns to encourage supportive behaviours towards persons diagnosed with mental illness. Addressing this gap was the primary intention of the grant proposal I wrote that evolved into the national campaign Beyond The Label, administered by NCSS in 2018. In the context of public education, it is important to promote supportive attitudes and behaviours.
Representative publications
Chan, Li Shan. A Philosopher’s Madness. Ethos Books, 2020. https://www.ethosbooks.com.sg/products/a-philosophers-madness
Chan, Li Shan. ‘Overcoming Stigma: How to Do It’. Hong Kong Journal of Mental Health 46, no. 2 (2020): 23–25. https://www.mhahk.org.hk/index.php/journal2020w/
EMPLOYMENT FOR PERSONS DIAGNOSED WITH MENTAL ILLNESS
Due to our neoliberal perspective concerning the value of work, employment and mental health is an issue that has received considerable attention in Singapore. A focus on leaders and employees experiencing mental distress considers the needs of the general population at the expense of a minority of disadvantaged individuals. Over the years, when people write to me, many of them have wanted to know how to find and sustain employment in the aftermath of a psychiatric diagnosis. Back in 2015, I had advocated a step-by-step approach, celebrating small wins. This was published in an article I wrote for Psychiatric Services, a journal of the American Psychiatric Association.
Representative publications
Chan, Li Shan. ‘On the Employment of Persons With Mental Health Issues’. Psychiatric Services 66, no. 8 (1 August 2015): 781–82. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.660801
SCHOLARSHIPS, AWARDS, AND GRANTS
2024 Li Siong Tay Charitable Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship. Tan Kah Kee Foundation, Singapore.
2025, 2024, 2020, 2021 Achievement Scholarship, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.
2024 National University of Singapore (NUS) Press Scholarly Publishing Fellow, Singapore.
2024 Social Studies of Medicine Writing and Publishing Workshop Sponsorship, University of Chicago, Hong Kong Campus, Hong Kong.
2022 Grace K.J. Abernethy Fellowship, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.
2021 – 2022 Graduate Teaching Assistantship, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.
2021 The Biography Prize, Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.
2021 CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award Winner, Honorable Mention, USA.
2021 Graduate Dean’s Research Scholarship, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.
2017 – 2018 Writer-in-Residence, Sing Lit Station, Singapore.
2016 Sponsorship for MA studies at UEA, National Council of Social Service, Singapore.
2015 Writing grant. Project 50/100. Singapore.
2014 Woodbridge Hospital Charity Fund Sponsorship to speak at World Federation for Mental Health International Congress in Athens, Greece.
2007 – 2008 Research Scholarship in Philosophy, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
CHAN LI SHAN 