What if people who use mental health services were put in charge of those services? How might they look different?

What happens when the client of an addictions service later comes back as the CEO? Or when an advocate who spent her 20s in and out of psych hospital is now in charge of some of the biggest changes Victoria's mental health system has ever seen? Or how about groups for people experiencing suicidal thoughts, run exclusively by other people who've 'been there' themselves?

In this in-person panel hosted by The Big Feels Club (and 2021 Australian Mental Health Prize winner Honor Eastly) we hear from lived experience experts trying whole new approaches to mental health in Australia, and we tease some of the big changes coming to Victoria’s own mental health system.

Come to the panel to get your brain juices flowing and then stick around to decompress afterwards with a hands-on drawing workshop with artist, cartoonist and feeler of feelings, Sarah Nagorcka AKA Gorkie.

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. 

Meet the Panelists

Heather Pickard is a leader in the addictions sector in Victoria with her own personal lived experience of addiction and long-term recovery. Since 2006, she has been the CEO of the Self Help Addiction Resource Centre (SHARC), a charity that supports over 9000 individuals and families annually to "help people to help themselves recover from addiction". The service is led and run by people with lived experience of addiction and recovery and runs residential recovery programs and statewide family support services. Heather is a leader in reforming the mental health and addiction services in Victoria, and over the past 16 years has grown SHARC to be a sustainable, valuable model for how we could do mental health and addiction services differently.

Amie Davis is a software engineer with a side passion for mental health peer support. After grappling with her own experiences of deep distress and finding that the conventional approach to mental health support was not always helpful, Amie became interested in alternative approaches. Amie is particularly passionate about the way we react to people when they have thoughts of suicide, and currently co-facilitates an Alternatives to Suicide ("Alt2Su") online peer support group, which provides a safe space for people across Australia to talk about their distress.

Mary O’Hagan was a key initiator of the psychiatric survivor movement in New Zealand in the late 1980s and was the first chairperson of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry between 1991 and 1995. She has been an advisor to the United Nations and the World Health Organization. Mary was a full-time Mental Health Commissioner in New Zealand between 2000 and 2007. Mary established the international social enterprise PeerZone which provides peer support and resources for people with mental distress. She has written an award-winning memoir called ‘Madness Made Me’ and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2015. Mary is currently Executive Director Lived Experience in the Mental Health and Wellbeing Division at the Department of Health in Victoria. All Mary’s work has been driven by her quest for social justice for one of the most marginalised groups in our communities.

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.