Tanya Marwaha is a lived experience strategist working to change whose experience shapes mental health systems.

She grew up between British and Punjabi cultures while living with depression, anxiety and two long-term disabilities, Fibromyalgia and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which went undiagnosed for seven years. She survived suicide attempts as a teenager. In her community, mental illness and disability were often explained as a lack of faith or the evil eye, and the professionals she turned to rarely understood what it meant to be young, disabled, South Asian and female. That gap, between how systems are designed and how people actually live, is what she works on now.

During the pandemic she founded Championing Youth Minds from her bedroom, a youth-led community that went on to support over 5,000 young people worldwide, while completing her degree at LSE.

Today she works where decisions get made. She is a Lived Experience Partner to the Department of Health and Social Care, Lived Experience Lead at BABCP, Peer Researcher at Samaritans, and Research and Policy Lead at Taraki. She has been a trustee at West Sussex Mind since the age of 20, and previously served as a trustee at Baton of Hope UK and a non-executive director at Disabled Students UK.

She is studying Medical Anthropology and Mental Health at SOAS as a CAMHRA scholar, focusing on how culture and power shape what counts as mental health knowledge.

She has spoken on TEDx, ITV News, Sky News and BBC Newsnight, and has reached over 116,000 people across four continents. She speaks English, Hindi and Punjabi.