Poetry has a unique ability to capture experiences that are often absent from reports, datasets, and meeting minutes. My Anger Without Permission explores the emotional reality of being an ethnic minority unpaid carer navigating mental health services while experiencing exclusion, microaggressions, invisibility, and a lack of recognition.

These themes are closely connected to the aims of the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF), NHS England’s anti-racism framework for mental health services, which seeks to improve access, experience, and outcomes for racialised communities by ensuring that patients and carers are listened to, involved, and able to influence change.

Central to PCREF is the belief that lived experience should shape services, and poetry provides a powerful way for carers to share those experiences in their own words.

My poem also highlights why unpaid carers must be visible within conversations about race equality and mental health. Many carers from ethnic minority communities provide significant emotional and practical support while feeling overlooked by the very systems they help sustain. By sharing stories through poetry, carers can challenge assumptions, increase understanding, and contribute to more culturally responsive services.

To help amplify these voices, submissions are now being invited for Unpaid, Unseen and Yet Unbroken, a forthcoming poetry collection edited by Matthew McKenzie FRSA BEM. The anthology will showcase poems from minority ethnic unpaid carers, creating a lasting record of their experiences, resilience, hopes, and challenges.

If you are an unpaid carer with a story to tell, this is an opportunity to have your voice heard, published, and become part of a growing movement for equity, recognition, and change within mental health services.