I’m a mad survivor artist, activist and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. On this site I share my stories of madness, trauma, hope, cynicism, rage, healing, shame, and creativity.
I am a survivor of child abuse, madness and forced psychiatry.
I remain outraged that the mental health system made my trauma worse by ignoring it, and then re-traumatising me all over again .
I wrote about these experiences in a paper called Russian Dolls and Epistemic Crypts (2022).
This outrage continues to fire me to speak out against the violence of psychiatry and to be an activist for change.
I am a recovery expert by experience.
After years of life as a revolving door psychiatric patient, heavily medicated, unemployed and without hope, I finally found a way out. It began with a therapist and a keyworker who saw my potential rather than my limitations, and helped me to find both hope and coping skills.
But the real recovery work came down the track, from my peers and counsellors, when I began to address the real issue: not a mental ‘illness’, but the impacts of child abuse.
My life was transformed by the hearing voices approach, by trauma counselling, and peer support.
These things put hope in my heart and that keeps me fighting for change as well. Because I know, absolutely, that we can do so much better.
