About

I work as a consultant, Open Dialogue practitioner, supervisor, academic and trainer in mental health.

My work is grounded in Intentional Peer Support, Open Dialogue, Mad Studies, social justice movements (including the consumer/survivor/peer/lived experience movement) and tertiary studies in sociology, political science, law and linguistics. I draw on my own experiences as a survivor of childhood trauma, in dialogue with the work of international networks of people who are humanising our collective responses to people in distress. My work has also been significantly influenced by the Hearing Voices movement. I understand distress and “mental health” as deeply embedded in the social world.

In 2015, I was awarded the SANE Australia Hocking Fellowship to explore the intersections between peer work and Open Dialogue. In 2017, I was keynote speaker at The Mental Health Services conference, and in 2018, I was keynote speaker at the Danish Open Dialogue conference.

I have worked with several innovative organisations where the expertise of people with lived experience is foundational – including inside out & associates, Intentional Peer Support, Our Consumer Place, VMIAC and Working to Recovery, Australasia – as well as more mainstream academic and mental health institutions, including the Centre for Psychiatric Nursing at the University of Melbourne, RMIT University, La Trobe University, Victoria University, Lifeline, SANE Australia, Suicide Prevention Australia, Monash Health, CoHealth, Northern Area Mental Health Service, Spectrum, the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, the NSW Mental Health Commission, and several Recovery Colleges around Australia.