What is the Value and What are the Values of Lived
Experience?
Proposed Schedule for Day 3 of the 2024 PACFA
Conference
Session One: 9:00am to 10:30am
1. Into the Lion’s Den - Lived & Livid Experience Perspectives
This session offers a beginning
inquiry into what we mean by the term 'lived experience'. Increasingly, lived
experience is attempting to be integrated into service design and delivery and
policy development across sectors. Without necessary interrogations about
power, purpose and polarity and the influence of wider systems, many are being
harmed. Here, we will come together to explore terminology, challenging
practice questions, and the inherent tension of identifying openly with lived,
living and livid experiences without becoming engulfed by them.
Session Host: Morgan Cataldo
Morgan has for the past 15+ years been developing and advocating for
participatory practice and peer education as essential levers for
creating true, lasting, powershifting systemic change in services for
historically excluded communities. Her commitment and passion stems from her
own intimate lived experience of service systems. Morgan is the the Founder and
Principal Consultant of morgan&co (‘co’ for
collective), where she advises, coaches, and consults with organisations both
in Australia and internationally. These organisations seek to understand the
role of power in their everyday work, and how to design more meaningful
policies, programs and services through partnering with people with
lived/living experience and expertise relevant to their purpose. Morgan holds a
degree in Social Science and is a Visiting Fellow of the School of
Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University.
This session will explore:
- how the term “lived experience” is framed in
contemporary policy and services
-
peers as puppets – co-opting the consumer
experience
-
stockholm syndromes – capture and invitations to
collusion
-
the cheapest rung on the mental health worker
ladder
-
hypervisibility – lived experience peer workers as
sore thumbs
-
super-tokenism – the professional-psychiatric
juggernaut rolls on
-
benevolent othering and the power of providing care
and imposing treatment
-
identity as commodity – over-identification with
labels and selling ourselves
-
lived experience as morality and integrity - least
powerful, most accountable
-
reflections on designated work roles versus human
lived experience
- the shoulders upon
which we stand and the networks in which we are entwined
-
what’s lived experience leadership, how is it
conceived of, where is it situated?
You will leave this session
with:
a. More resources to interrogate what is meant by lived experience in your
context and assist you develop a clearer alignment with theory and practice
b.
Greater shared clarity and
deeper understanding and opportunities for application, based on common
challenges related to working alongside lived experience perspectives
Session Two: 10:45am to 12:15pm
2. The Emperor's New Clothes: Domination, Duty of Care & Dignity of Risk
This session offers a deepening
inquiry into the relationship between Duty of Care and Dignity of Risk? What
is a “reasonable” (“good enough”) standard of practice when you fear or know
someone is suicidal (or a danger to others)? What are “best practices”?
Following on from the earlier session, we explore how we might take more
seriously the insights and learnings of the lived and living experience
community, and move towards articulating our own understandings of both
“reasonable/good enough practice” and “best practice”, including raising
collective professional standards towards better/best practices.
Session Host: Flick Grey
Flick was a member of the Ministerially-appointed Independent Panel
reviewing Victoria’s mental health law, as someone with lived experience of
forced treatment, and 15 years of deep engagement with mental health systems
transformation. She is a psychotherapist, trained in Open Dialogue and
facilitating Intentional Peer Support for over 10 years. Pre-madness, Flick
studied law and social theory, and continues to nerd out on interweaving these
worlds, with warm data, compost and more-than-human networks.
This session will introduce and
explore:
- duty of care, dignity of risk and reasonable practice as
legal obligations
- the new mental health and
wellbeing act in victoria
- enshrining “dignity of risk”
as a legal framework
- reimagining and clarifying what we mean by “risk” and
danger
- crisis as opportunity
- collective accountability practices
You will leave this session
with:
a. an
increased understanding of the meaning of “duty of care” in the context of
“dignity of risk”
b.
practical strategies for becoming more deeply engaged in questions of duty of
care, reasonable standards of professional practice and best practices, rather
than being stuck in fear or uncertainty in complex situations
Session Three: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
3. Oh
The Places You’ll Go: Beyond
Neoliberal Individuals & Clinical Professionals
This session will reflect on our
cultural moment and reintroduce systemic and structural interventions and the
contexts within which they emerged and the values they reflect. We offer an
introduction to how the Social Determinants of Mental Health and the Community
Development Continuum apply to emotional distress and mental illness,
contrasting this with prevailing corporate, professional, clinical and
individualised dynamics. The importance of supporting the mobilising of social
movements and the expression of activism will be explored as will be the need
for roles beyond the clinic-office and interventions and actions beyond health,
welfare and therapy, and beyond a focus on individuals only.
Session Host: Daryl Taylor
Daryl works as a peer practitioner. He has a lived experience of
psychiatric incarceration-institutionalisation as a teenager and young adult in
the public mental health system. This experience was violent, destabilising and
traumatic and initiated a lifelong inquiry. This sense-making wanderlust roamed
through many careers including working as a nurse in emergency departments and
trauma centres, community health and psychiatric settings, and roles as a
systemic family therapist, disability worker, indigenous treaty broker, public
health planner, disaster preparedness consultant, community development worker,
participatory action research and evaluation specialist, governance and
leadership consultant, community arts and cultural development worker, workshop
host and conference presenter and university lecturer and tutor. Daryl is an
emotional CPR (eCPR) facilitator. He enjoys deep listening, appreciative
inquiry, ‘gifts differing’, post-normality and non-pathologising approaches to
reframing emotional distress and mental illness as existential phenomena. He
disappears down systems theory, political-economy, geo-politics, energy
descent, futures studies, and non-western mythology, cosmology, ancestry and
eldership podcast rabbit holes. Daryl loves chaos, outsiders, jesters, monsters
and tricksters.
This session will introduce and
explore:
- the ubiquity and dominance of the professional
managerial class
- how does professionalism and the politics of
politeness impact your practice?
- the myth of ‘objectivity’ and professional
distance and professional judgement
- the myth of ‘rationality’ and the turn to
contextuality and relationality
-
clinical, social, cultural, ecological, epistemic, economic and political iatrogenesis
- evacuating the clinic: alongsidedness, allyship
and accomplice practices
- what we do in the shadows – symathesy – collective self-help and mutual learning
- lived experience as plural (“we”) rather than
singular (“i”) first-person science
- heading upstream: the social determinants (and
dynamics) of mental health
- the community development continuum as
inoculation for iatrogenesis
- community as verb:
learning from/healing with mad, queer and first nations folks
You will leave this session
with:
a. a beginning understanding of what might constitute
a post-colonial, post-normal, post-professional and post-clinical peer paradigm
b. a working understanding of the application of The
Social Determinants (and Dynamics) of Mental Health and The Community
Development Continuum
Session Four: 2:45pm to 4:15pm
4. Where
The Wild Things Are – Mental
Health: As if The Earth Really Mattered
This session introduces
post-human voices and other others: other species and ecosystems, other
climates and other generations: our ancestors and our descendants and offers a
rich conversation based in ecological, evolutionary and nature-based interventions
and experiences. How is what is happening to our wider world impacting who we
are becoming and what challenges and dilemmas we face? How does time spent
outdoors impact emotional distress and mental illnesses? What does it mean to
live in a time of systemic degeneration? What can we learn from looking through
regenerative lenses?
Session Host: Jeff White
Jeff is currently a Community Link Facilitator in
community mental health with eight years of lived experience peer support work
with Neami National, Mind Australia and local health services. He has a
Master’s degree in Environment & Sustainability and his background
also includes work in environmental education, community development, social
work and Nature therapy. He is a passionate advocate of bringing soul back into
psychology and Nature back into society so that humans can reclaim their authenticity
and wholeness within the web of life.
This session will introduce and
explore:
-
what has nature ever done for us?
-
bringing therapy to life and life to therapy
-
environ–mental health: degenerative and
regenerative approaches
- energy descent, growth economies, industrial jobs
and geopolitical resource conflict
-
the world outside our selves
-
co-liberating ecological selves
-
entangled in relational and contextual realities
-
from eco-psychology to psycho-ecology
-
ecological-anxiety and gaian pathologies
- disasters and the human condition
-
grief and loss, co-extinction and climate crises
- crip ecology, queer nature and indigenous
perspectives on country and spirit
-
a counselling of all beings
-
psychotherapies in service of life
You will leave this session
with:
a. a beginning understanding of the
embedded, entangled and embodied nature of our human culture within the larger
web of life from eco-psychology to psycho-ecologies
b. having pondered the
disconnect between psychological practices, ecological realities and spiritual
aspirations and explored therapeutic meaning-making ecological practices