organizers / group members

Matt Jackman 
Matt [they/them and/or we/us] received Australia's National Mental Health Advocate award by the Mental Health Foundation of Australia in 2020. Matthew is the Founder/CEO of The Australian Centre for Living Experience, a peer run centre for living experience persons seeking alternative peer approaches. They survive/live with Bipolar Affective Disorder and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ( 'as defined' by DSM/Psychiatry), is a sibling caregiver/supporter to their younger brother and sister who live with enduring psychosocial diverse abilities, and has lost their mother to suicide, and consequently grandparents due to stigma/discrimination. 

Matthew's experiences of distress and service use drive their passion for global social change in mental health. They are a global mental health activist promoting human rights, social justice and lived experience from public health and MAD STUDIES disciplinary basis. Matthew qualified in Social Work undertaking counselling, case management, group therapy, community development, social research, social policy and personal/systems-level advocacy across diverse intersectionalities. Matthew's advocacy and research reflects alternatives to biological, psychiatric and 'psy' science approaches to wellbeing. They mobilise MAD STUDIES as the scientific foundation for peer/lived experience work in mental health. 

Through giving voice to those silenced in achieving an equitable world, justice is therefore worked towards. Matthew instructs Mad Studies through co-designing/producing a lived experience focused critical mental health unit in Social Work. Matthew is proudly Mad, Neurodiverse, Non binary and Queer, utilising their intersectional experiences of oppression and privilege in systemic advocacy. They use pain for purpose - in loving memory Samantha.
Nev Jones PhD
 Nev is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh, and an activist scholar committed to psychosocial disability/lived experience leadership, and attention to the social and structural underpinnings of conventional mental health practices and conceptualizations of 'psychopathology.' She has extensive personal experience of psychosis-focused mental health services and intersecting systems.

Her academic work spans specialized psychosis services, crisis systems, benefits and welfare policy,  the peer workforce, and first order change in public sector mental health systems.  She currently co-chairs the participatory research workpackage of the Lancet Psychiatry Commission on the Psychoses, and (with Keris Myrick) co-edits the Lived Experience Involvement & Leadership column at Psychiatric Services.

Nev's publications can be accessed (most full text) at www.researchgate.net/profile/Nev_Jones  
Michelle Colder Carras PhD
Michelle  is a public health scientist specializing in mental health, epidemiology, informatics, and relationships between technology and health. She has collaborated with researchers around the world on evidence reviews, commentaries, and quantitative, qualitative and unique mixed methods designs. She has an in-depth knowledge of methodological approaches in many health-related fields. Her doctoral and postdoctoral training has been funded through several NIH training fellowships. She currently works as an independent consultant helping nonprofit organizations conduct mental health research. Her publications and blog can be found at http://mcoldercarras.com/.
Louise Byrne PhD
Louise is currently employed at RMIT University as a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Management. Louise was awarded the inaugural 2017 RMIT Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship to conduct research in the United States and will be based at the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health for several months in 2018. Louise has been a Chief Investigator on past and present projects that combined have been awarded over $1.3 million in competitive funding. Louise's research interests include mental health lived experience/peer workforce development, recovery principles, health professional capacity building and diversity/inclusion employment. Louise has nearly 10 years University research and teaching experience on lived experience in mental health and has worked in lived experience specific positions since 2004. She is based in Queensland, Australia.
Dina Poursanidou PhD
I have a background in psychology and education and have been a University-based social science qualitative researcher since 2000. My doctoral and postdoctoral research has spanned a range of fields, such as mental health, education, child health, youth justice, and social policy/social welfare.  My main research interests and areas of expertise include depression in young people; sociology of mental health; the intersections of gender, physical health and mental health; violence in inpatient mental health care; workforce issues in welfare services; psychosocial aspects of long term medical conditions in young people; educational and social exclusion in young people; critical approaches to Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in health/mental health research; service user-led/survivor research in mental health; theory and practice of qualitative research with a particular focus on narrative and biographical research; theory and practice of critical ethnography; ethics in qualitative health and social care research;  the use of critical autoethnography in mental health research; andthe use of visual methods in research.
I started using mental health services in 1991. In the period 2010-2014, following a very severe and enduring mental health crisis between July 2008 and June 2010, I worked in two Universities in the north of England as a Service User Researcher. In the period  February 2015-February 2018 I worked at the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London where I held a 3-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) and Improvement/Implementation Science. During my time at SURE I carried out a process evaluation of a violence reduction programme on inpatient psychiatric wards using a service user-led critical ethnographic approach. Since 2010 I have been involved in mental health politics and  I am a member of the Asylum magazine editorial group – Asylum, the radical mental health magazine, provides an open forum for critical reflection and debate of mental health issues. Since July 2017 I have also been a member of the UK-based National Survivor User Network (NSUN) and its Survivor Researcher Network (SRN) Working Group.
Sarah Carr PhD
Sarah is Senior Fellow in Mental Health Policy and Academic Lead for Involvement at the Institute for Mental Health (IMH), University of Birmingham, UK. She has both an academic and personal interest in service user and survivor knowledge and in mental health social care. Sarah has experience of mental distress and mental health service use and uses this to inform all her work. She is a member of the editorial board of Disability and Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and an independent expert advisor for the Wellcome Trust Mental Health Programme.
A National Institute for Health Research, School for Social Care Research (NIHR SSCR) Fellow, Sarah was Principal Investigator for the first NIHR SSCR funded user-led study. The research explored mental health service user perspectives on targeted violence and abuse in the context of adult safeguarding in England. While at Middlesex University London she was Co-Director at The Centre for Co-production in Mental Health.
She is currently the involvement lead for the NIHR Mental Health Policy Research Unit and for the UKRI Loneliness, Social Isolation and Mental Health Network. She is a co-applicant on the ‘Open Dialogue: Development and Evaluation of a Social Network Intervention for Severe Mental IIlness (ODDESSI)’ study, the first trial of Open Dialogue in the NHS in England.
Sarah is currently Principal Investigator for an NIHR SSCR funded, user-controlled study on avoidable harm in adult mental health social care and is lead for the IMH Mental Health MSc module on Service User and Carer Involvement.
Miriam Larsen-Barr DClinPsy
Miriam is a clinical psychologist with lived experience and strong roots within the service-user movement in Aotearoa, New Zealand and beyond. Her research explores transdiagnostic approaches to supporting recovery, and service-user experiences of taking and attempting to withdraw from antipsychotic medication. Miriam is passionate about service-user led research and service delivery, is advisor to several other service-user research projects, and is the co-founder of the recently formed Aotearoa Therapists with Lived Experience Network (ATLEN).
Marie Hansen PhD
Marie is a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Her research focuses on community-based psychosocial interventions for psychosis with a particular emphasis on hearing voices and motivation/motivational self-regulation ('amotivation'/apathy). Additionally, she is interested in feminist approaches to reproductive mental health across the lifespan. She is firmly committed to a deep democratizing of mental health policy, research, and clinical practice.
​Ryan J. Dougherty, MSW, PhD
Ryan is a social welfare scholar and Fellow of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medicine. Their work examines ethical problems in health and social welfare policies for vulnerable populations involved in intensive mental health services, particularly in relation to growing social inequities like poverty and mass incarceration. They use qualitative methods and draw across interdisciplinary perspectives, including sociology, anthropology, and social work, as well as critical theoretical perspectives in feminist, disability, and mad studies in order to highlight the role of power in shaping the ways medical and social services are delivered and experienced. Ryan is also being trained in clinical ethics consultation services and aims to guide both theory and practice towards building a more ethical and just society for vulnerable populations.