Community mental health in Australia developed in relation to changing models of institutional care from the 1960s. Leaders and practitioners in the field included psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health nurses, social workers, occupational therapists, mental health advocates, and people who themselves had experienced mental health treatment inside institutions in the period between the 1970s and late 1980s. Our team’s study of the histories of community mental health in Australia involved peer workers in mental health as researchers and has resulted in over 100 oral history interviews. In this reflective piece we consider the work of this team in building new researcher capacity, a process that involved challenging conversations about team leadership and group dynamics, which often created space for the open discussion of everyday mental health experiences in a way that enriched the research process for all participants. Moving from our own respective research identities as historians, mental health professionals, and peer workers, we highlight the distinctiveness of an approach to storytelling and peer mental health in a project about the recent histories of mental health. This deeply political moment means a deep reconsideration of researcher identities to enable new narratives of psychiatry, mental health services, and mental illness to emerge from the late twentieth century to reshape potential future models of care. The Re;Minding Histories Research Group also hopes that it will inspire new and more inclusive approaches to historical inquiry.