Holly Kemp
I am Holly, a queer, poly, femme, semi-professional feeler of big feelings. I have a lived experience of mental distress, a passion for justice, an appetite for dialogue, big love for the natural world and growing food and flowers. I work as a Lived Experience researcher in a couple of research teams at the University of Sydney and as a Peer Support Worker in a couple of clinical teams in the public mental health system.
I got involved in coproduced research and service delivery because I wanted to see more lived experience perspectives involved… after all as mental health service users we arguably have the most ‘skin in the game’! I want to support the move from people with psychiatric labels being the subjects of research, to being participants. And I think having people with lived experience as colleagues inside research teams makes this more possible, lending symbolic value (nothing about us without us!) but also plenty of pragmatic expertise that comes from first person knowledge about what it can be like to experience mental distress, sanism, oppression and navigating mental health systems.
I am so grateful to be part of this research team and to be able to learn from our history; what innovations have been tried, what worked, what didn’t, and according to who. I could not think of a better way to hone my own theory of change a sculpt a vision for a just mental health system....
So far I'm working towards one that puts an end to involuntary treatment, enables unlimited access to free therapy for survivors of trauma, and establishes peer run respites and other alternatives to hospital. I want there to be an abundance of hearing voices groups and alternatives to suicide peer support groups and open dialogue mobile crisis teams so there are options for people to understand and recover from mental distress if the psychiatric/biomedical worldview doesn’t feel helpful to them. These are the hope stories I have found so far and I'm still on the hunt for more!