This supervisor has been approved to provide supervision under the ACCESS TO SUPERVISION PROJECT.

My first and constant concern, when supervising, is always safety. There are some marvellous and transformative results that the LLEW can achieve for consumers and services, but, there are also challenges, even risks in working from a consumer perspectives in non consumer spaces. I believe strongly that not even those important results is worth avoidably or predictably compromising the recovery of a single LLEW worker.

I believe the best way we can meet those challenges, manage those risks that can seem so unsurmountable for individuals , is together, all of us in the consumer workforce and consumer movement supporting each other, learning from and teaching each other, current workers and the learnings of our movement.

Being a part of that mutual support has always been rewarding, professionally and personally, and this is what i try to bring to y supervision.

This supervisor has been approved to provide supervision under the ACCESS TO SUPERVISION PROJECT. If you are a supervisee who has received an approval email/letter from the CMHL you may contact this supervisor for supervision for this project, then follow the stated processes for supervision payment.

I have almost three decades of experience in the consumer workforce, most recently fourteen years part-time with the Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council as an advocate, including being a senior member of a small team and giving orientation, supervision and training to new team members.

I have also worked as a Consumer Consultant and separately as a Peer Support Worker in 4 different large public mental health services, for the last 20 years. This involves close collaboration with staff of the mental health services, involvement with all areas of the service and direct weekly regular one-to-one contact with, and rights meetings for, voluntary and involuntary patients in the acute wards.

I have practised lived experience work in a great many of the possible settings (Acute ward, SECU, Community Care Units, CMMHS, PARC, management committees and tertiary training environments).

I have worked in almost and with all of the possible organisational environments, from welcoming recovery-orientated services, through overworked and dedicated but very traditional clinical services, to the very occasional environments frankly hostile to consumer participation, and all the points in between.

I retired a couple years ago, and moved away from Melbourne but after the Royal Commission I returned to work part-time as a consumer consultant in regional Victoria, with a view to contributing to the support and growth of the burgeoning LLEW workforce.

I have completed a Bachelor of Arts, with majors in Psychology,

I have also completed Intentional Peer Support and Train the Trainer courses.

My approach as a supervisor is informed by CPS training of course, but also by my own experiences of seeking supervision, decades before there were formal resources. I found much value in • a sympathetic and informed sounding board with compatible values and experience • an opportunity to have practice reviewed but not judged by someone unconnected with one's workplace • reflections about dealing with challenges based on personal experience and vicarious learning • information about what was happening in the consumer space in other places, in our state and worldwide, • advice and feedback about stress levels and job satisfaction However one of the most valuable things I found, was validation, listening to someone’s experiences and reactions to events at their work and, if appropriate and accurate , just saying ‘Me too!”

The experience of being the one person with a different perspective in a crowd of others can be disconcerting to someone who’s had the experience of, in the past, seeing the world in a way they afterwards acknowledged as skewed or ‘symptomatic’

“This time it’s them, not you,” if accurate, can be a very profound reassurance.