I’m available for co-reflection / supervision sessions for folks who are working in mad, peer or mental health spaces, and who want to explore and reflect on their practice from a critical perspective.
People I work with include:
- Peer support workers: working from consumer, psych survivor or mad perspective
- Consumer/survivor/mad advocates, advisors, educators, researchers or related roles
- Other workers who embrace an anti-carceral, mad, non-pathologising and/or rights-based ethical stance—or who want to respectfully explore critical conversations about practice and ethics in a protected space (see notes below)
I can offer ad hoc or ongoing sessions, online via zoom
Contact me
If you’re interested in seeing me for co-reflection/supervision, please complete this contact form and I’ll get in touch within a few days. Or if you’d like to know more, scroll on to read more about my supervision practice.
Keep an eye on this site as I only have a limited availability while I’m doing my PhD. I will update this page if I no longer have available spaces.
Info below:
- My approach to co-reflection and supervision
- What will we do?
- My ethical stance
- My experience
- My knowledge base & training
- My fees
- Contact me
My approach to co-reflection and supervision
My supervision/coreflection practice is deeply rooted in the values & dreams of the C/S/X (Consumer/Survivor, eXpatient) movement. I draw on ideas & practices from mad studies & survivor research—and from anti-carceral, anti-colonial and intersectional feminist praxis. I believe our madness, oppression & liberation is all connected.
My practice is consistent with the Consumer Perspective Supervision Framework (Vic), though I don’t aim to follow any particular model—rather I seek to be an authentic human with you and offer a space where you feel able to say or ask anything you need to, and where we can reflect together.
Sometimes supervision/coreflection can move in and out of peer support, depending on the situation and what you value. I think this is natural, given how much of ourselves we bring into our work.
I’m not here to fix or help or give you the answers, but to be someone with you in exploration. I bring expertise—but so do you—so our work will be in what we make between us.
I think we all need to have some relationships of deep respect where you always feel welcome, where you can say whatever you need to, and where you know our relationship will be ok. I try to offer that. This doesn’t mean I won’t challenge you sometimes (I almost certainly will!), but that will always be informed by mad ethics, respect, curiosity and love. And you are very welcome to challenge me too – in fact I really welcome and encourage that!
What will we do?
Co-reflection will be guided by you, and I am always open to being flexible. Some typical conversations that come up in supervision with me include:
Noticing and disrupting power in the contexts around you
- Noticing common ways that consumer/survivor/mad workers can experience double-binds, epistemic injustices, tokenism, discrimination, gaslighting, isolation and other examples of power at work
- How power impacts survivors/consumers in the system, and you as a worker
- Exploring strategies and tactics that attend to power and make sense in your context
Being with someone through the tough times, joyful times and ’meh’ times
- Reflecting on, and learning from, the challenging, lonely, confusing, &/or painful aspects of our work
- Making space for you, how your own experiences intersect with your practice, and what sustains (or squashes) your spirit
- Thinking through work options, decisions and pathways
Exploring mad/survivor/consumer ethics – in philosophical and practical ways
- Considering what makes our practice emancipatory or oppressive
- Noticing, understanding & strategising about peer drift & co-option
- Exploring ways to promote self-determination & human rights
- Deepening understanding of mad experiences different to our own
- A mad, sociopolitical approach to trauma
- Navigating non-pathologising approaches to support, language and advocacy
- Reflecting on our choice of language and where that comes from
I know this sounds like a lot. No-one does all these things, and sometimes we won’t do any of these things in a session.
Sometimes supervision is just a space where you can be your messy authentic work-self/self, and be witnessed compassionately and without judgement. Sometimes it’s about laughing together about how outrageous and silly life (and systems) can be. Sometimes we need to dream together about a different world. Sometimes we might cry together.
My ethical stance
I try to offer a protected space that is unlike most spaces for consumer/survivors. Where we can breathe, be ourselves and be free from oppressive ideas and practices.
Supervision is only of value if you think that it is, and you are the person who decides what ‘safety’ and ‘respect’ feels like for you. When we start working together we’ll explore this together, including your rights and privacy, note-taking, and ways I seek to be transparent and accountable in our relationship.
In my practice I seek to be accountable to you, and to the larger community of survivors, consumers and mad folks.
I commit to anti-carceral practice (no coercion, no force, no pathologising) in my supervision as well as in my peer support. We will also explore this when we start working together.
My experience in co-reflection and supervision
I bring my own experiences of madness and psychiatric systems into supervision, along with eighteen years experience working in and around the mental health system in survivor/consumer roles.
I absconded from ‘lived experience’ work in 2022, and I’m now pursuing abolitionist paths by doing mad research into survivor-led alternatives for self-injury, and offering/collaborating on mad, independent peer support projects. I cofacilitated an Alt2Su group for 14 months, I host mad gatherings, and I’ve put on mad, interactive art projects, like Slice/Silence for folks who use self-injury.
Previously I’ve worked in pretty much every type of consumer/survivor role, so I have a solid understanding of the work we do and the contexts we work in, the challenges we face. Past work includes:
- peer support and community support work
- founding and managing a peer program / Victorian hearing voices network (Voices Vic)
- executive consumer work (GM of consumer and carer advocacy at a large NGO)
- governance consumer work (sitting on boards)
- government policy work
- sector trainer
- senior consumer advisor
- systemic advocacy work
- consumer academic work
- advisor to the Royal Commission into Mental Health
I’ve also done lots of consulting work (with clinical services, government, academia and community sector) and education work (guest lecturing and training at many different unis).
I have offered supervision/coreflection to consumer/survivor workers since 2009, and I’m a guest trainer in the consumer perspective supervision course offered by InsideOut and Associates.
My knowledge base & training
My most important learning has always come from other mad folks, psych survivors and critical consumers. I continue to meet with and read the body of knowledge from our mad community.
In terms of training, I’ve completed Intentional Peer Support, Alt2Su/Alternatives to Suicide (Wildflower Alliance), Suicide Narratives (Matt Ball), eCPR (Dan Fisher) and online courses with IDHA, cultural safety training (VACCHO) and trauma training (CASA, Jacqui Dillon).
I’ve completed (and delivered myself) many courses in the hearing voices approach, including voice profiling, voice dialogue and alternatives for working with ‘paranoia’ / alternative beliefs, including training with Rufus May, Ron Coleman, Jacqui Dillon, Eleanor Longden, Dirk Corstens, Marius Romme and Pete Bullimore. I have also done training with Vikki Reynolds and I find her ideas around ‘justice-doing’ and ‘acts of resistance’ especially powerful.
I’ve done loads of other mental health training too, but mostly I’ve had to unlearn those ideas because they are incompatible with mad peer support, consumer perspective and anticarceral ethics.
I’ve been a trainer myself since 2007, and I’ve taught on recovery, hearing voices, trauma informed practice (from an abolitionist, survivor perspective), consumer/survivor work, codesign & coproduction, and been a co-trainer with Lucy Johnstone on the Power Threat Meaning Framework. I am also a partner and trainer at Athena Consumer Workforce Training. I am currently developing survivor perspective training on self-injury.
I used to teach at universities across all clinical disciplines (psychiatry, nursing, psychology, social work, occupational therapy) but I have withdrawn from most of that work now. I still teach regularly into social work (depending on the program’s openness to challenge), criminology and law, on: trauma/oppression, the C/S/X movement, abolition and carcerality, self-injury, suicide and hearing voices, and human rights.
My fees
Erg, the uncomfortable money bit. My standard rates are:
- Survivor/consumer workers – individual sessions – $150/hour
- Survivor/consumer workers – small group sessions – $300/hour
- Other workers – individual sessions – $200/hour
While I am studying I am not in a position to offer a sliding scale very often. This is because my scholarship income is quite low, and supervision is part of how I cover my basic costs of living, and any mad community work that I do. However, in the future I very much hope to offer a sliding scale.
I recognise that this can be a lot of money for people who are self-funding instead of having their employer fund supervision, so if it’s too much I will try to flex where I can.
Notes for folks who are non-survivor/consumer/mad workers interested in coreflection:
Most of my practice is with consumer/survivor workers, however I do occasionally work with people from other disciplines (ie, clinicians, community workers, lawyers, policy workers).
In this context, supervision/coreflection might focus on some of the ideas above, but particularly:
- Reflecting on your practice ethics through a consumer/survivor lens; deepening understanding of the harms of many mainstream psych practices, unlearning carceral messages
- Exploring anti-carceral, rights-based approaches for your own practice, and how to get there
- Considering ways to de-pathologise language, thinking and practice
- A protected space to explore, ask questions and consider mad/survivor /consumer ideas
- Reflecting on your own lived experience (if relevant) as a non-lived experience worker, and what that means for you and others
I welcome working with non-consumers/survivors who embrace a similar ethical stance, or who are keen to respectfully explore more critical conversations in good faith. You don’t have to be all the way ‘there’ yet. None of us are, including myself—and I don’t expect you to think the same or to have a ‘perfect practice’.
However, it’s important to say that I am no longer able to do the emotional labour of working with people:
- who support or justify inherently violent practices in psychiatric systems (i.e., detention, using cops, solitary confinement, forced drugging or electroshock), or
- who aren’t at least open to non-pathologising approaches.
