David Allen
Mental health policies sit on the intranet, but stigma still does most of the work in deciding who speaks up and who stays silent. Wellbeing budgets do not change that. Hearing one person describe, in detail, what living with a clinical anxiety disorder is actually like changes it more than another framework. The question is whether the workforce has ever heard that voice from outside the HR slide deck.
David Allen is a public speaker and Lived Experience Practitioner who uses his lifelong history of OCD, anxiety and depression to break the stigma around mental health for general audiences.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with David Allen
- He speaks from inside the experience, not about it. A person describing decades of OCD, severe health anxiety and depression in their own words does work that a clinician or a policy lead cannot do.
- He is a trained Lived Experience Practitioner, formally accredited to use personal recovery to support others, and a People’s Champion with Champions for Change, the volunteer movement that succeeded the Time to Change campaign run by the charity Mind.
- The mental health talk, “Living with OCD: A Survivor’s Guide”, is autobiographical and practical at the same time: it covers triggers, daily impact and the coping strategies he has built, rather than general awareness messaging.
- He also offers researched social-history talks on Victorian England and storytelling travel sessions, which makes him a flexible choice for community groups, member associations and after-dinner programmes that want a single speaker for a varied evening.
Biography highlights
- Lived Experience Practitioner working through Champions for Change, the volunteer movement that succeeded the Time to Change campaign of the mental health charity Mind.
- Holds the People’s Champion designation within that movement.
- Around 15 years as a professional public speaker, with festival appearances at Buxton, Edinburgh Fringe and Latitude.
- Member of the Dickens Fellowship, with a research focus on Victorian social and criminal history.
- Trained as a solicitor and as a primary school teacher before moving into full-time speaking.
- Regular speaker on the UK community-association circuit: U3A, Rotary, WI, Townswomen’s Guilds, Probus and 41 Clubs across the south east of England.
Biography
OCD is one of the most misunderstood common mental health conditions in the workplace. It is treated as a punchline about tidiness, when in clinical reality it is an anxiety disorder that can take hours out of a person’s day. Allen has lived with it since childhood, alongside depression and severe health anxiety, and has built a public talk out of that experience rather than out of theory.
The credential that sits behind the talk is specific. After the pandemic, he trained as a Lived Experience Practitioner, the formal route by which people with their own history of mental illness are accredited to support others in recovery. He volunteers as a People’s Champion with Champions for Change, the local volunteer network that took over from the national Time to Change campaign run by Mind in 2022. That gives the OCD talk a grounding in something more than personal disclosure.
The wider speaking career runs alongside that work. Allen trained as a solicitor and then as a primary school teacher before going full-time on the speaking circuit, where he has now been for around fifteen years. He is a member of the Dickens Fellowship and writes and performs researched talks on Victorian England, on Charles Dickens specifically, and on his own bicycle and hitchhiking journeys across Europe and North Africa. He has performed at Buxton Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe and Latitude.
For a corporate audience, the value is narrow and specific: a first-person account of severe OCD, delivered by someone who has spent years working out how to talk about it in a room of strangers. For community associations, member groups and festival programmes, the range widens into Victorian history and travel storytelling.
Key speaking topics
- Living with OCD and severe health anxiety
- Lived-experience mental health advocacy
- Stigma and mental illness in everyday life
- Victorian social history
- Charles Dickens and his world
- Long-distance bicycle and hitchhiking travel
Ideal for
- Employee wellbeing programmes, mental health awareness weeks and stigma-reduction events inside large employers
- Healthcare and nursing audiences looking for a lived-experience voice alongside clinical content
- U3As, Rotary Clubs, WIs, Probus groups, 41 Clubs and similar community associations
- Literary festivals, history societies and after-dinner programmes booking storytelling sessions
Audience outcomes
- A concrete understanding of what OCD looks like from the inside, beyond the cultural shorthand
- Specific coping strategies that one person has developed over decades of living with anxiety
- Permission to talk about mental health more openly inside teams and families
- For history audiences, a researched and entertaining window into Victorian social life
Talks
An autobiographical account of life with severe OCD, anxiety and depression, and the practical strategies the speaker has developed to manage them.
Key takeaways:
- What OCD actually is as a clinical anxiety disorder, not the cultural caricature
- How triggers and intrusive thoughts function in daily life
- The coping practices one person has built over decades of lived experience
A researched portrait of Charles Dickens, from his childhood working in a factory through his career as a novelist and social reformer.
Key takeaways:
- The biographical detail behind the public figure
- How Dickens used fiction as a vehicle for social criticism
- Why his work still reads as a record of Victorian social conditions
A social history talk built from period newspapers and court records on notorious Victorian murder cases.
Key takeaways:
- How Victorian policing and the press handled major criminal cases
- The social conditions that shaped the crimes
- The way public appetite for true crime took shape in the nineteenth century
A travel storytelling session built around a long-distance bicycle journey from London to Cairo.
Key takeaways:
- Crossing Europe, North Africa and the Middle East by bicycle without flying
- The encounters and mishaps that shape a long solo journey
- A non-corporate, narrative-led session suitable for community and after-dinner audiences