About the workshop:

In many spaces suicide distress is discussed through a risk-averse lens that centres organisational safety over human connection. Part of having a more human approach to supporting people starts with addressing common myths and misconceptions about suicide, as well as approaching the support in a way that upholds dignity, autonomy, and human rights. This workshop aims to build the skills of attendees, is built on the foundations of lived experience wisdom and is facilitated by people with lived experience of suicide distress.

Who this workshop is for:

This workshop is for lived experience community members that want to learn skills around more compassionately supporting people in distress who may be experiencing suicidal thoughts.

At LELAN we define lived experience as having been through mental health issues and/or distress, social issues, or injustice that is so significant we have to have to reimagine and redefine ourselves, our place in the world, and our future plans [Louise Byrne & Til Wykes, 2020].

Themes covered:

common myths and misconceptions

addressing who risk-averse approaches really protects

the reality of harm caused by clinical approaches, police, and forced interventions

what it really looks like when dignity, autonomy, and human rights are upheld in responses to suicide distress

skills for connecting and supporting people in suicide distress that are centred in compassion

Structure of the day:

This is an interactive facilitated workshop that will include presentation of information by the facilitator(s), large and small group discussions and reflective exercises. The knowledge, skills and diverse experiences of participants will be drawn on to create an environment of dialogue, shared learning and community.

Workshop facilitator:

The lead facilitator for this workshop will be Emrys Temple-Heald (He/Him), Peer Training Coordinator.

You can learn more about the LELAN team at www.lelan.org.au/our-people.

*If you have not registered for the ‘Sharing Safely and for Influence’ online module, or have not completed this previously with LELAN, we encourage you to do so.

The ‘Sharing Safely and for Influence’ content will encourage reflection on how we manage our own needs and boundaries but will also explore strategies for caring for others when sharing our stories. This will provide a foundation to work from leading into the workshop days. For more information or to register for this online please click [here].

This is a recurring event - after you have registered once you are able to attend all of the LEARN events for the year via the same zoom link.

About the Lived Experience Advocacy Reflection Network (LEARN):

LEARN is a space for connection amongst people in South Australia who are interested in or new to using their personal lived experiences with mental health and other life challenges in advocacy for community and self.

When shared for a purpose our lived experience is a powerful tool that helps us connect with others and offer insight. Join us as we explore tools and strategies to use our experiences for change.

We collectively choose topics together at the start of each LEARN. 

Who is LEARN for:

LEARN provides a regular space for South Australian people with lived experience that are interested in or new to advocacy, to connect, reflect and explore ways of using their personal experiences with mental health and other life challenges in advocacy.

If you are interested in or are currently using your lived experience for advocacy and want to connect with others, share resources, refine skills and reflect together then LEARN is for you.

Please note that the focus for LEARN is creating a connection space for the lived experience community broadly. It is not a community of practice and does not focus on workforce. 

When and Where:

LEARN will meet online via Zoom every six weeks on a Tuesday.

This is a recurring event - once you have registered you are able to attend all of the LEARN events for the year via the same zoom link

Tue, 25 Feb, Tue, 8 Apr, Tue, 20 May, Tue, 1 Jul, Tue, 12 Aug, Tue, 23 Sep, Tue, 4 Nov, Tue, 16 Dec,

Facilitator:

The facilitators for LEARN on February 25th will be Emrys and Jess

You can learn more about the LELAN team at www.lelan.org.au/our-people. 

In South Australia, rural and regional communities have been overlooked in discussions and responses covering mental health and suicide prevention.

That is why LELAN has partnered with Country SA PHN as part of the Commonwealth government’s Targeted Regional Initiatives for Suicide Prevention (TRISP).

Under this initiative, an Advisory Group of people who have lived experience of suicide distress have collaborated to create a short film about what we have heard from our communities.

It aims to reduce stigma, increase help seeking, and improve community responsiveness and advocacy by sharing insights and solutions from people who have lived experience of distress or who have been impacted by suicide in rural and regional South Australian communities.

We will be holding an online launch for our short film, to share it with the community.

The format of the event will include:

Introduction

Film Screening

Panel Q&A

This online launch will be held 5:15pm – 6:15pm Thursday 27 June online via Zoom.

If you RSVP to this event, you will be sent the Zoom link to join us.

Join us for a powerful online abolitionist webinar exploring why we must dream, build, and fight for a world beyond psychiatry. Rooted in Mad pride and resistance, this session will unravel the violence of the medical model and how it pathologises our natural responses to a brutal world.

Psychiatry, like the prison system, polices difference and marginalisation, cages distress, and criminalises survival. But our grief, rage, and breakdowns are not disorders—they are truths. They are reasonable responses to unbearable conditions and can be paths to healing and liberation.

We need to stop diagnosing what is political, stop sedating what is sacred, and stop demanding placid compliance and wellness as conditions for belonging.

Our panel:

Indigo Daya:

Indigo is a mad, queer, multiply disabled psychiatric survivor who brings lived experience of violence, incarceration, and psychiatric labelling to their abolitionist work. After 18 years in the mental health system—including as a consumer worker—they walked away in 2022, no longer believing in reform that continually harms survivors. Their work now centres on building alternative solutions to psychiatric oppression—ones rooted in collective care, creativity, and justice. Indigo is passionate about epistemic justice, survivor-led initiatives, and using the arts to amplify mad wisdom and resist carceral systems. They work in community with fellow survivors through peer support, co-reflection, and mutual learning, always with a vision toward collective liberation.

Dr KJ Hepworth:

KJ is a queer, disabled activist/scholar, passionate zine maker, artist and teacher whose work centres on making space for access, connection, and mutual care. As the current co-recipient of the Stratford Scholarship, where they are exploring what care could look like outside of psychiatric systems of harm. Their work asks: What would it mean to hold each other in our full humanity, without pathologising pain? Across all of their work, KJ is committed to imagining and building liberatory futures, and creating accessible tools that help communities move toward those visions together.

Mush McLoughlan:

Mush McLoughlan is a white settler living on unceded Wurundjeri land. They are a mad psych survivor and deathsinger (someone who lives with ‘suicide’) and dream of a world free of cages of all kinds; from prisons to psych wards. Mush has a long history of navigating mental health systems, particularly crisis and suicide prevention services. These experiences have shown them the violence of coercive and pathologising approaches—and sparked their commitment to imagining and building radically different ways of being with people experiencing ‘suicidality’ or singing their death song. Mush began doing this work, co-founding and co-facilitating Alternatives to Suicide Naarm and with their 2024 Stratford Scholarship project where they explored deathsongs as a non-pathologising, community-based responses to ‘suicide’.

Tabitha Lean:

Tabitha Lean is a criminalised, Mad survivor and resister. She is a poet, artist, storyteller, disruptor, and troublemaker. Her work emerges from lived experience of both criminal and psychiatric incarceration, and is grounded in collective care, creative resistance, and the refusal of carceral and psychiatric control. She lives and creates at the margins — with love.

Tabitha is a co-recipient of the Stratford Scholarship, where she hopes to open a creative portal of possibility to imagine worlds beyond cages—where communities of care, grounded in radical reciprocity, render coercive psychiatry obsolete.