OUR CONSUMER PLACE RESOURCES
Our Consumer Place produces many resources, including booklets, presentations, cartoons, reports and submissions. These resources are all brought together in this section of our website.
We also produce resources specifically for Consumer Developed Initiatives (consumer groups, projects, etc), including tips for getting money - there's a separate section of this website for these resources "For Consumer Groups" (see the second orange flag at the top, or click here).
- Help Sheets (opens new webpage)
- Recent presentations/writing by OCP staff
- Merinda's cartoons
- Interviews with international consumer/survivor leaders
- A series of golden consumer-perspective research
- OCP Booklets:
- Submission to the Exposure Draft Mental Health Bill
Recent presentations/writings by OCP staff
By popular demand, we have decided to make some recent public presentations and writings by OCP staff available here.
- Falling Out of Your Social Class - Merinda Epstein writes about her experiences of falling out of her social class. An earlier version of this paper was published in the Our Consumer Place newsletter December 2012-January 2013.
- What does the "peer" actually mean? - Some questions to stimulate our deeper thinking about peer support work Some questions that Flick Grey formulated for The Peer Conference, Centre for Excellence in Peer Support, Tuesday, 30 October 2012
- To Live is to Fight: Human Rights in Mental Health - Flick Grey speaking about human rights at the Dax Centre, August 2012
- Shame, Trauma and self-harm: when self-harm is a sane response to an insane world Merinda Epstein's keynote speech on self-harm at the Mental Health Services Summer Forum on Confronting Self-harm, February 2012. (3.6MB)
- This is not about Catharsis!: My time in HDU Merinda Epstein's reflections on her (horrifying) experiences in a High Dependency Unit, mid-2011. Concludes with recommendations for change.
- Becoming more peer-focussed? Flick Grey's talk at the Mental Illness Fellowship, November 30th, 2011 (457 KB)
Borderline Personality Disorder Awareness Day (Oct 5th, 2011)
- Preface to "BPD: Diagnosis of Shame" Merinda Epstein's preface words - about the deep role of shame - before her powerpoint.
- "BPD: Diagnosis of Shame" Merinda Epstein's Powerpoint (2.54MB)
- "How can we talk about this?" Flick Grey's opening speech (with poem)
The Mental Health Services (TheMHS) Conference, Sept 2011, Adelaide
- "Positive thinking about Consumers" by Flick Grey (in ongoing collaboration with Merinda Epstein) (1.4MB) This paper was published in TheMHS 2011 Book of Proceedings, in the 'Recommended Reading' section.
Merinda's cartoons!
At last, Merinda Epstein's (a founding member of the OCP team) insightful and bitingly funny cartoons - consumer-perspective social commentary (on the "mental health system", life with a "mental illness" and the state of the world) are available for your enjoyment.
Merinda reflects: "To go to the heart of the many issues involved with being a consumer of mental health services I have drawn these cartoons which present the issues in a humorous, satirical or ironical manner."
To view the cartoons, click here. These are progressively uploaded, so do come check them out again!
Interviews with international consumer/survivor leaders
As a regular feature in our monthly newsletters, Our Consumer Place team members have been interviewing leaders in the international consumer/survivor movement. And what an amazing bunch of wise thinkers this is!
- Shery Mead: Amongst other things, Shery is the founder of Intentional Peer Support, which teaches peer-run alternatives to crisis services (interviewed October 2008).
- Sylvia Caras: Sylvia is the founder of the magnificent website: www.peoplewho.org, which was one of the very first websites run by and for people with lived experience of mental distress (or as she says "people who ...") (interviewed December 2008).
- Peter Beresford: Peter is Chair of Shaping our Lives, the independent national service user controlled organisation and network in the UK (interviewed March 2009).
- Mary O'Hagan: Mary is a leading international expert and original thinker in the field of mental health recovery-based services, and recently a founder of PeerZone (interviewed March 2010).
- Tina Minkowitz: Tina is a psychiatric survivor and human rights lawyer (interviewed April 2010).
- David W. Oaks: David is Director of MindFreedom International (interviewed May 2010).
- Chris Hansen: Chris has been instrumental in developing and training Intentional Peer Support, as well as being heavily involved in the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability (interviewed June 2010).
- Susie Crooks: Susie is a straight-talking, gutsy consumer leader from New Zealand speaks out against chronic normality (interviewed July 2010).
- Ron Coleman: Ron is a Scottish Mental Health Trainer and Consultant, particularly active within the international Hearing Voices movement (interviewed August 2010).
- Oryx Cohen: Oryx is Co-Director of the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community, co-founder of the Freedom Center, former director of MindFreedom's Oral History Project ... and recently founded the project Healing Voices (interviewed October 2010).
- Steve Onken: Steve is a Hawai'i-based recovery scholar and practitioner (interviewed February 2011).
- Debra Wells: Debra is a service user, consultant and educator from New Zealand, with a special focus on trauma-informed care (interviewed June-July 2011).
- Mary Campbell: Consumer Consultant, Te Korowai Whariki, Regional Forensic Rehabilitation and ID Mental Health Services, New Zealand (interviewed April 2012).
- Anne Beales: Director of Service User Involvement at "Together: Working for Wellbeing" (UK) and a keynote speaker from the VMIAC consumer workforce conference (interviewed June 2012).
- Rufus May: a psychologist with lived experience of "mental illness", and gentle revolutionary (interviewed August 2012).
Plus, we have occasionally interviewed locals:
- Kim Koop (September 2009): Kim is CEO of VicServ (Victorian Peak Umbrella Group of community-managed mental health services). Kim does not identify as a consumer/survivor, but has been a wonderful ally in promoting consumer/survivor leadership.
- Catherine Reidy: Catherine shares her work on Pridentity. Grassroots activism at its best! (interviewed October 2011)
A series of golden consumer-perspective research
We decided these incredibly valuable research projects needed to be made accessible so that more of us can learn from them. So, here we present summaries of thes wonderfully sophisticated, consumer-driven projects that yielded such sensible, useful insights. We can't recommend these materials highly enough.
- The Understanding & Involvement Project (U&I): 1991 -2001: an enormous Participatory Action Resarch project (summarised here), that emerged from a localised, grounded, response to a consumer organisation's demand that 'something must be done to change acute services' and that this must be driven by consumers.
- Deep Dialogue 1: Developing a structure that would allow for deep conversations to take place between consumers and service providers.
- Do you Mind? The Ultimate Exit Survey - Survivors of Psychiatric Services Speak Out: Powerful educative materials from survivors about some of the most important issues affecting consumers, including stigma, communication, medication, crisis assessment teams and gender.
- Lemon Tree Learning: An educational resource, looking at the most effective ways that consumers can participate in mental health services
- Lemon Looning Board Game: A teaching resource which is ostensibly a board game, but is really about creating an environment for consumers to educate staff by sharing their experiences in the mental health system.
- Second Deep Dialogue Project: Consumer-Staff Collaborative Groups: A Strategy for Enhancing Workplace Culture in Pursuit of Quality Outcomes.
"Psychobabble: the Little Red Book of Psychiatric Jargon"
Psychobabble has been put together by Merinda Epstein at Our Consumer Place in response to a demand from people diagnosed with 'mental illness' for a collection of psychiatric jargon, acronyms and what we think are some of the silly expressions used in psychiatry - it's our take on the words used by them (and sometimes us) about us.
While some of the explanations are provided simply to define terms and acronyms that people are very confused about, Psychobabble is also an attempt to provide a consumer perspective on concepts that many people (including some clinicians and consumers) haven't thought through or may be happy to leave as they are.
Of course, some parts of Psychobabble are also about having a light-hearted spray at the pontification and judgements made about us - consumers - by some clinicians and medical researchers. We don't believe that such a publication, written from a consumer perspective, has been produced in Australia before. Although Psychobabble is based on Victorian bureaucratic language, experience tells us that many of the words and explanations are transferable interstate and internationally.
We want others to contribute to this work. Please send your ideas, disagreements, reinterpretations, silly stuff, acronyms, and new bureaucratic-speak to Merinda at Our Consumer Place (merindae@ourcommunity.com.au).
Download a copy here (1.4MB).
"Deep Insight: Leaders in the International Mental Health Consumer/Survivor Movement share their thinking"
This booklet shares the brilliant and transformative thinking of 11 leaders in the international consumer/survivor movement including Shery Mead, Peter Beresford, Oryx Cohen, Ron Coleman, Mary O'Hagan and many more!
Much of this material has been published before in Our Consumer Place newsletters over the years, but we brought it all together into one booklet so you can enjoy a burst of brilliant, inspired and transformative consumer/survivor thinking in one go! It is a veritable smorgasbord!
Illustrated with new cartoons from Merinda Epstein, this wonderful resource is now available from our website. We can send hardcopies free to Victorian consumers. We sincerely hope you enjoy it - it has been a labour of love to produce!
Option 1: Download a copy here
Option 2: (for Victorian consumers only) Request a FREE hard-copy to be posted to you by completing this form. Please note that you will automatically be joining our mailing list by completing this form.
"Speaking Our Minds: A guide to how we use our stories"
A FREE resource, written entirely by mental health consumers.This booklet is all about mental health consumers' stories - how we use them, why we might not use them, and how we can best make use of our stories when we do share them.
This isn't just another book written by "mental health experts" telling us what's good for us; instead it's 84 pages all written from the perspective of those of us who have been there and have the stories to tell! And it includes some fabulous new cartoons from Merinda Epstein.
The booklet is free to download from our website (see below). Consumers can request a FREE, single hard-copy to be posted out to them. Otherwise, hard copies are $10 each (which is still below the cost of printing, postage and handling). It was launched by the Hon. Mary Wooldridge (Victorian Health Minister) at the opening of Mental Health Week, October 10th, 2011.
Option 1: Download a copy here
Option 2: Contact Our Consumer Place to place an order for multiple copies (@$10 each); service@ourconsumerplace.com.au or download the order form
Option 3: (for Victorian consumers only) Request a FREE hard-copy to be posted to you by completing this form. Please note that you will automatically be joining our mailing list by completing this form.
"So, you've got a 'Mental Illness'? ... What now?"
A FREE resource written entirely by mental health consumersFinally! A resource written by those who have been there. This booklet is an introduction to the mental health system, to "consumer perspective" and to some of the diversity of how consumers respond to a diagnosis of 'mental illness,' written entirely by a team of mental health consumers.
It provides information ranging from what "consumer" means to how diagnoses work; from where to find help to human rights frameworks. It is brimming with useful information, all from the perspective of people with lived experience of 'mental illness.'
Beautifully illustrated with cartoons by batty cartoonist and 2004 HREOC Human Rights Award winner, Merinda Epstein, and punctuated througout with thoughts about madness, creativity, power, language and the human condition, this resource will appeal on many different levels.
Praise for "So, you've got a 'Mental Illness'? ... What now?":"Congratulations on a great publication. It is a pleasure to read something that reads so well. You have managed to find a voice that is accessible, sustains itself on the side of the consumer without being in any way shrill or provoking, and at the same time is very informative. I enjoyed reading it, which is a most unusual thing. Why can't all publications in the field of mental health be written in this sort of style. Perhaps the answer is both that it's not all that easy to achieve, as well as that people have been persuaded that managerial styles of writing is what we should be reading."
- Malcolm Morgan, Senior Manager from MIND Australia
Option 1: Download a copy here
Option 2: Contact Our Consumer Place to place an order for multiple copies (@$10 each); service@ourconsumerplace.com.au or download the order form
Option 3: (for Victorian consumers only) Request a FREE hard-copy to be posted to you by completing this form. Please note that you will automatically be joining our mailing list by completing this form.