I am very pleased to announce that I have been awarded a scholarship to complete a Cert IV in Mental Health (Peer Work)!

Round of applause! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Thank you! *bows*

I am at TAFE now, checking out the campus and enjoying the very quiet Level 3 of the library

I found the scholarship program a couple of months ago when I was talking to a friend about wanting to help others heal and grow and transform from mental illness. Because “a healthy world arises out of healthy minds”. My own and my family’s mental health has been patchy lately, so I’m proud of myself for making and finding and stealing the time to complete the application, network with some of the people administering the program, and land myself a scholarship!

From the course description, the Cert IV will

allow you to support people in their journey of recovery from mental illness, working in mental health services roles that support consumer peers or carer peers. Workers are employed in the mental health sector in government, public, private or community managed services.

For obvious reasons, I’m not mad-keen on the jargon in general, and in particular, the idea of referring to people as ‘consumers’. A lot of our mental-health concerns are the direct result of our consumerist society. But I’m excited about participating in the community to find ways of referring to these experiences in ways that are constructive and healthy. And I’m excited about getting involved in the lives of people who are actively working to recover through their mental-health challenges.

A lot of us are living with mental illness in a silent way, understanding that our challenges are a reflection of problems embedded in our culture, and we want to find ways of being that are more aligned with wholesome and holistic values. That’s where I would like to come in, helping others to recognise that each of our actions are what make up culture, and therefore it’s worthwhile making the effort to be the change we want to see in the world.

The scholarship was awarded by the Queensland Alliance for Mental Health (QAMH) and they have one of the shorter acronyms I have noted already in the sector. It’s going to be strange working in something called a ‘sector’, using sector jargon and trying to navigate the unwieldy institutions I have encountered already. But I’m hoping I can find a nice and chilled place to work where people understand that the symptoms of mental-illness nuances of humanity cannot be squared into a box, neatly labelled and promptly disregarded as abnormal or pathological because their presentation doesn’t match the checklist of the biopsychosocial model.

I am very much interested in representing the spiritual dimension of the holistic approach to mental-health treatment, especially since I experienced my own acute spiritual crisis in 2017. In fact, since that experience (despite a few tangents) I have been trying to find ways to help in this area, and I feel like it is now starting to come together.

When I look back even further, I remember that in my late 20s when I was moving away from my publishing career, a big part of the motivation for that shift was the desire to help make change in our society and culture in a way that was more direct than publishing alternative ideas. I loved working in publishing and I still cherish the value of literature to help move society in a more wholesome direction. However, at the time (and still now) I felt that the urgency of the need for change was such that I couldn’t rely on the ideas percolating through into action fast enough.

I had also discovered Buddhism in my mid-20s and what I saw there was already motivating me to find a way I could work in the world that leveraged and served the deep metaphysical curiosity that was goaded by my research and practice in Buddhism.

I am in my late 30s now, and a lot of the time in between has been spent travelling and/or haphazardly searching for a way of being that is alternative to the mainstream offering. On that journey I have experienced periods of debilitating depression, various manifestations of addiction and a deep sense of alienation from my self and the truth, and I believe that similar unmet curiosities are leading others into similar conditions, which is why I would like to help.

The mental-health conditions resulting from these blocked metaphysical curiosities are an opportunity to explore new territories of existence and consciousness, and it’s coming to the time when it’s no longer appropriate to just slap on a pathology label and throw away the key.

It’s time to start mixing metaphors!

It’s time to start unlocking the root causes of these conditions and to help others see how the crisis is the solution.

That’s a permaculture idea, the problem is the solution, and it applies well here to life and health, as many permaculture ideas do. I believe the epidemic of mental illness that we are experiencing as a global community is the result of a collective spiritual crisis. Since God is dead and his throne has been filled by bankers and CEOs, the rest of us are left wondering WTF is going on.

I’m reluctant to get too new-agey here, but as we move into the Age of Aquarius, one of the things changing is that we no longer need priests and gurus and other middlemen to mediate our phone calls to God. We no longer need to suffer alienation from the source of creation ~ we can take our spiritual practice and alchemical transformation into our own hands. We don’t need the approval of a church or the authority of any external source.

🤣 maybe we just need more holistic peer workers enabling individuals to step into their agency and map the path of recovery from alienation on their own terms

Here’s to that, and to new beginnings!

Becoming a peer worker means I will have the formal training and qualification to work in roles supporting those in our community who are experiencing difficulties maintaining their mental health. These are non-clinical roles, where the value is in the peer worker’s lived experience of recovery from mental illness.

I do have plans to study psychology in the future and perhaps move in to clinical and research roles, but for now it’s looking like I’ll be studying 3 days a week at TAFE Qld South Bank for the next 12 months or so.

The Cert IV requires students to complete 80 hours of work placement, and due to the skills shortage in this area it is common for work placements to become paid employment after the Cert IV is completed.

So it’s going to be an interesting part of the journey to helping others through transpersonal crises, which is my longterm goal.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty excited about this. If you’re curious about peer work or have some experiences to share, please drop a comment below or otherwise get in touch, I would love to hear from you.