This essay is part of our Member Essay series, in which we invite members to share new perspectives on Creative Health.
Maddie Kitchen is the founder of Sobriety Films UK and a fellow of The Royal Society for Arts. Maddie is an experienced director and has worked with various organisations and projects such as Rethink Mental Illness, Turning Point, the Recovery Street Film Festival and the Reel Recovery Film Festival USA.
This piece was written in response to our 2026 callout theme, The State of the World, Politics and Creative Health, exploring the intersections of Creative Health with lived experience and power.
With many thanks to Maddie for this member essay.
Creative Health is not just something I work in — it is central to who I am as a social filmmaker. My practice is shaped by lived experience: by moving through depression, anxiety, and addiction, and by finding ways to survive when systems did not hold me. Film became a way not only to process my experiences, but to transform them — to move from stigma and silence into expression, connection, and change.
I care deeply about Creative Health. I believe in its potential — and I also think we need to be honest about the power it holds.
Creative Health is often framed as something gentle, supportive, even neutral. But it isn’t neutral. It exists within funding structures, health systems, and cultural institutions that shape which stories are told, whose voices are prioritised, and how those stories are framed. As someone working with lived experience communities through Sobriety Films, and as Creative Director of the Recovery Street Film Festival, I see how often people are still spoken about, rather than truly listened to.
When lived experience stories are shared — particularly through film — they are often shaped around crisis. The most visible and dramatic moments: breakdown, addiction, trauma. These narratives are seen as powerful, but they can also be reductive.
Recovery is far more expansive than that. It includes identity, care, friendship, boredom, humour, anger, creativity — the full, complex reality of being human. Much of this is often left out of the frame.
In my work delivering trauma-informed film workshops, the starting point is not “what’s your story?” but “what feels safe to share?” Many of the people I work with have come through systems where their voices have been controlled, interpreted, or ignored — whether in health services, criminal justice, or the media. Trauma-informed practice resists urgency. It centres choice, consent, and pacing. It does not ask people to perform their pain for impact.
When those conditions are created, something shifts. People stop telling the story they think is expected of them — and begin to tell the story that actually matters.
Often, that shift moves the work beyond the individual. Stories of addiction or mental health open out into stories about housing, poverty, stigma, racism, gender, and care systems. This is where Creative Health becomes political — not because it is trying to be, but because lived experience is social knowledge. It reveals the conditions people are living within, not just the symptoms they carry.
Access is central to this conversation. As a filmmaker with a disability, schemes like Access to Work are not an added benefit — they are what make my practice possible. When that support is delayed, reduced, or removed, people are still told they are welcome in creative spaces, but the means to participate are taken away. Creative Health cannot claim equity if access is treated as optional. It is not generosity — it is infrastructure.
There is also an ongoing tension around value. Lived-experience storytelling is frequently celebrated — in festivals, reports, and funding bids — while the people creating that work often remain economically insecure. Proper pay, creative ownership, and resourcing of care are not extras. They are fundamental questions of power, equity, and sustainability.
Through my work, I use film to create spaces where people can reclaim authorship of their own narratives — not as case studies, but as culture. Film allows for contradiction, ambiguity, and unresolved truths. It resists the pressure to simplify or resolve lived experience into something neat and consumable.
Recovery Street Film Festival exists to hold that space. A space where lived-experience films are treated as cultural work in their own right. Where audiences are invited to listen, rather than fix. Where stories unfold on their own terms.
So does Creative Health challenge dominant systems, or uphold them? The answer is: it can do either.
If it is used to help people cope quietly within harmful conditions, it risks reinforcing those systems. But when it is trauma-informed, when authorship is genuinely held by those with lived experience, and when access, equity, and care are properly resourced — it becomes a space of political possibility.
Not because it offers simple solutions, but because it shifts who gets to speak — and how seriously they are heard.
Because when people claim the right to tell their own stories, they don’t just change narratives — they change the terms of power itself.
Watch Maddie’s short film on the recovery mural below.