A little note from Den after the Queensland Mental Health Week Achievement Awards
We were finalists for the Queensland Mental Health Achievement Awards! So yesterday, some of the Haven team went along to the awards ceremony!
Being a finalist amongst an amazing crowd of other mental health professionals was such an honour. I want to say a big thank you to our Meanjin and Naarm teams who look after our clients in person and online. They are the most beautiful souls and compassionate humans I am honoured to call colleagues and friends. Also, to the Health professionals who trust us with their clients and patients.
Most especially, thank you to our beautiful clients who honour us with the privilege of trusting us with their stories and intersectionality of their lives, of the socio-cultural, political and other barriers impacting their mental health with their dedication and resilience as they invest in their mental health.
As for the ceremony, we are so grateful for Open Minds and all the sponsors for their work and advocacy year in and out for Queenslanders, especially the major sponsor Queensland Mental Health Commission and to Headspace for sponsoring the LGBTQIA+ Award and the amazing work done with our young people across Australia and especially here in QLD.
Songwoman Maroochy, thank you for the most beautiful and soul-filling Welcome to Country. I’m not an emotional person generally but your Welcome tugged my heart and my eyes were certainly “not dry”.
To the Absolutely Everybody Choir, your voices and songs were the most wonderful way to start our weekend. Again, my eyes were “not dry”
A big congratulations to our fellow finalists, as well as everyone in the other award categories for the work you do for our state. Especially to Annabelle and Mitch (who represented winners the Queensland Council for LGBTI Health) for sharing their stories. We know our people are incredibly vulnerable and the horrible stats are even higher, almost 20% higher, in some mental health measures for our communities than for the cis-het community.
The theme for this year’s Queensland Mental Health Week was connection. Yesterday, the Queensland Mental Health Commissioner Ivan Frkovic, Open Minds Chair Joanne Jessop, Governor of Queensland Dr Jeanette Young and former rugby league and boxing champion Joe Williams all mentioned – connection takes a village. And that is such an important concept here at Haven. Haven is here to reconnect not only our QLD communities, but our wider Australian communities. Haven is here to challenge and break the old system, deconstruct and decolonise mental health systems and bureaucracy, to help rescript and change the narrative, and lead the way to build the new. The new systems, the new connections, the new way of seeing our fellow humans. To be trauma-informed, culturally responsive, inclusive, affirming, and accepting of the intersectionalities that we all hold in our spectrum of humanity. That’s where connection grows.
So on that note, a little shameless plug!
Beyond our clinical client focused work as psychologists and psychosexual therapists, Haven are also trainers and consultants. We provide CPD and training for other health professionals and organisations across Australia. If you need in-house or online school or workplace training to ensure you are meeting and exceeding the legislation requirements, or if you want your policies, procedures and workplace culture to be trauma-informed and to ensure diversity, equity, inclusivity, wellbeing and belonging especially for the LGBTIQAP+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy communities, then please contact us! If you’d like support working with neurodivergent and disabled people, or any of our protected peoples under the Human Rights Act, in a respectful, culturally responsive, affirming, intersectional and connected manner, then we are your people! It takes a village, so let’s work together to break the old systems and build the new! Let’s face it – the old systems are already beyond broken.
Den.
