Georgia Valis
I am a researcher and teacher at Sydney university, with a background working in community health.
My contribution to the project is a focus on the role of cultural identity in shaping mental health experiences, and locating voices from new and emerging communities through Australia’s history. My Honours thesis highlighted how experiencing mental illness and the psychiatric system was different, and at times more difficult, for some individuals and their families who migrated from Europe to Australia during the 1950s to 1980s, compared to those who were born in Australia.
Two years into the project, I remain excited and proud to be an active member of this diverse and dynamic research group, working with service users and researchers with lived experienced, academic researchers and their students, psychiatrists and psychologists to write (and hopefully learn from) the history outside mental hospitals. I’m hopeful that through our process of coproduction, lived experience perspectives will meaningfully shape research findings as they have our research methodologies, and that the stories we come to tell are more representative, and more accurate because of this.