Black Dog Institute is a not-for-profit organisation and world leader in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of depression and bipolar disorder. As a not-for-profit organisation, the Institute engages volunteers in all levels of its workforce. The majority of these volunteers deliver lived-experience community education programs in Australia.

The aim of this presentation is to explore the Institute’s approach to fostering purpose, community and connectedness within our volunteer workforce as a way to positively impact mental health.

In 2014, the Institute involved over 100 volunteers in the delivery of community mental health awareness presentations, primarily in NSW and more recently across Australia, reaching over 18,000 people. These presentations have shown excellent outcomes in relation to stigma reduction, mental health literacy and help seeking.

In 2015, the Institute will continue to recruit additional volunteers in the delivery of this important work, with a particular focus on rural and regional areas. The expansion of this team presents challenges to providing appropriate support and engagement opportunities. The Institute recognises the importance of this responsibility with the potential to positively contribute to the mental health of our volunteers.

The focus of this presentation therefore, will be to consider the challenges, learnings and initiatives employed by Black Dog Institute to positively influence the experience of our growing volunteer team and to impact on good mental health.

Pain is a private experience. Describing it to others can be difficult because it means translating feelings into words. Moreover, traumatic experiences can be encoded within bodies, minds, and psyches in ways that go beyond verbal thoughts. Yet being silenced is a potentially disempowering act, as it can exacerbate traumatic experiences by fostering feelings of worthlessness. Artistic expression, however, can enable people to share some of the effects of trauma through facilitating the expression of emotions. In response, I argue, creative arts as research methods can expand our understanding of emotions connected to traumatic experiences and give voice to that which has been unspeakable. I draw from my own Doctoral research that used artistic expression in data collection to explore women’s lived experiences of child sexual abuse and eating disorders. This study was based in a contemporary research methodology that privileged marginalised voices through the use of dialogic interviews. In this paper, drawings and poetry provided to the researcher are examined to highlight multiple meanings determined by both the artist and the viewer. I demonstrate how creative arts can develop, support and supplement research findings through facilitating multiple understandings about women’s lives, and presenting thoughts and feelings that words cannot.

Evidence-based practice has been the clinical gold standard in mental health for the last 20 years. However, the practice of evidence-based health service management is relatively new, only made possible by recent technological advances. One of the key challenges in implementing evidence-based management is bridging the gap between data and the cumulative experience of a managerial team. Here I present a case study of two possible methods for bridging this gap: group program logic modelling, and collaborative simulation modelling. Participants were senior mental health managers (N=15) in a large public health provider who engaged the services of a simulation modeller for a series of service planning decisions. They participated in two 2-hour facilitated group program logic modelling sessions before key individual decision-makers engaged in a further 1-hour session of simulation model building. Preliminary survey and observational data shows that the process of model building increased participants’ understanding of their health service. This result highlights the potential of collaborative model building as ‘thought support’, where the benefit is in the process not just the outcome. The case study also highlights the need for flexible and continual engagement with decision-makers, and presents two potentially efficient and effective tools to this end.

Recent years have seen powerful growth in awareness of both the impact and the prevalence of traumatic experiences in many arenas of human distress, making trauma awareness relevant to all providers of human services. As we know this is undoubtedly true in mental health services. Yet this awareness is worthless unless we make the necessary changes to both the way our systems and services are structured, and to our professional practice. Some features of traditional mental health service provision are incompatible with the principles of trauma-informed practice, do not actively support healing, and can re-traumatise. The mental health sector is being forced into innovation, presenting us with many questions: Who are the experts? Who will lead this change? What do we need to change? What can we change right now?