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Mental Health Outside the Mainstream #1: Alternatives to Hospital

What if people who use mental health services were put in charge of those services? How might they look different? Tackle these questions and more during this thought-provoking online event.

An alternative to hospital specifically for mental health - swapping fluro lights and hard lino for cups of tea and card games. Whole different ways of seeing what mental health even is, based on the oldest living cultures in the world.

In this online panel hosted by The Big Feels Club (and 2021 Australian Mental Health Prize winner Honor Eastly), hear from lived experience experts trying whole new approaches to mental health in Australia.

Part of Big Feels presents "Mental Health Outside the Mainstream", the Big Feels Club host a series of events to get you thinking about how mental health services might look different if they were run by the people who use them.

Avril Hunt is recognised as one of New Zealand's few lived experience leaders in a senior provider role. Known for innovation and implementing optimal practice. Avril brings an established and effective approach to using lived experience (hers and others) in the work. An experienced occupational therapist, auditor, researcher, and trainer, Avril has spent 20 years working in the mental health sector and has developed learning processes, models of care, and workforce development initiatives in the organisations she has worked with. Avril's commitment to innovative approaches has led to improving the lives of people as well as positively impacting the staff delivering services. Avril believes that changing the way we deliver services is easy. We just have to want to enough.

Leilani Darwin is an Aboriginal woman who has been touched on a personal level many times by suicide and mental illness. She is a Quandamooka woman, whose ancestral home is Stradbroke Island. Through her own lived experience and work within the sector, Leilani is a powerful advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander led, culturally informed practices within mainstream services. In 2016, Leilani was the recipient of the LiFE Award for Excellence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention across Australia. Then again in 2016 she accepted an invitation to join the Queensland Suicide Prevention Taskforce for a three-year appointment. In 2017, Leilani was the proud recipient of the QLD Mental Health week Jude Bugeja Peer Experience award for devoting her professional life to assisting other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People to have access to the mental health supports.

Max Simensen has worked in Mental Health Peer Worker roles for over 7 years in the public mental health system, with his first job being at a local headspace when he was 17. Max fell in love with being able to harness his lived experiences and personal learnings to sit with others in familiar dark places. Max is an openly trans man who is passionate about the rainbow community but also embracing all other diversities of the human condition and pushing for social justice. Max has experienced intense times of suicidal thinking and behaviours over many years, and lost his younger sister two years ago after she took her own life. Max wants to change the way we look at suicide and how we hold space in those times. He is currently the SafeHaven Coordinator – which is a new peer-led service focused on offering an informal space staffed with people who have a lived experience of suicide as an alternative to emergency departments.

Honor Eastly is a critically-acclaimed podcaster, mental health advocate and recipient of the 2021 Australian Mental Health Prize. She is the co-founder of The Big Feels Club, a peer led mental health resource that has reached over one million people. In 2018 she produced the No Feeling Is Final series with the ABC, an award-winning memoir about her own experiences of suicidality described as “darkly funny” (by The New York Times) “total magic” (by The Atlantic), and “something rare” (TIME). She also works in the mental health sector where she specialises in peer workforce (services led by people who’ve been through it themselves) and systems reform. Most recently she had the opportunity to work on once-in-a-generation reform through the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.

Earlier Event: 30 March
Qualia
Later Event: 7 April
Reading the Mind