Explore local and international resources, articles, studies and reading recommendations within the sections above, along with most recent posts from each category below. We aim to keep information as up to date as possible, however, welcome any suggestions of studies etc that others would find beneficial to be added to the website.
Australian Supports
Helplines
Therapist finder
LGBTQ+ supports and resources
Autism supports and resources
Recommended Disability Supports:
National Disability Insurance Scheme:
“The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) is an independent statutory agency. Our role is to implement the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which will support a better life for hundreds of thousands of Australians with a significant and permanent disability and their families and carers. The NDIS provides funding to eligible people with disability to gain more time with family and friends, greater independence, access to new skills, jobs, or volunteering in their community, and an improved quality of life. The NDIS also connects anyone with disability to services in their community.”
I have been an NDIS participant since 2020 and it has helped improve my quality of life immensely. Through my NDIS funding I have been able to afford a careworker who assists me with things like running errands, attending therapy and providing social support. I am also able to use my funds to pay for my therapy sessions as CPTSD is my primary disability. If you would like to learn a bit more about my personal experience with NDIS and having a careworker, please feel free to watch these videos below.
Disability Support Pension (DSP) is financial assistance run through the Australian government and is a form of Centrelink Payment. DSP provides “Financial help if you have a physical, intellectual or psychiatric condition that is likely to persist for more than 2 years and stops you from working”
Approval for the DSP is a lengthy process and not everyone with a disability qualifies for this kind of assistance. I highly recommend applying for these payments if you meet the criteria, however, as they have made it so that I can literally afford the cost of living while taking care of my mental and physical health. Other options for those that are disabled and unable to work but might not meet the criteria for DSP include Jobseeker Payments WITH medical exemption from looking for employment. I have made a brief video talking about the Jobseeker pension.
Mental health blogs
The SANE blog
Run by SANE Australia. “SANE is the leading national mental health organisation run for people with recurring, persistent or complex mental health issues and trauma, and for their families, friends and communities.”
Suzanne Dang
Suzanne is an ambassador for Australian & NewZealand Mental Health Association that is currently working as a mental health peer support worker. She discusses her experience as someone with Bipolar type I.
Sarah K Reece
Sarah is a disability and inclusion advocate, artist, writer, and poet with lived experience with Disssociative Identity Disorder. They discuss many of their life experiences inclusive of mental health, physical health, gender diversity, and social justice within Australia.
Reading list
In early 2019, Rick Morton, author of acclaimed, bestselling memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder – which, as he says, is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him the most during childhood didn’t.
So, over the course of twelve months, he went on a journey to rediscover love. To get better. Not cured, not fixed. Just, better. This is a book about his journey to betterness, his year of living vulnerably. It’s a book about love. What love is, how we see it, what forms it takes, how we practice it in our lives, what it means to us, and how we really, really can’t live without it, even if, like Rick for many years, we think we can.
Journalist Elfy Scott grew up in a household where her mother’s schizophrenia was rarely, if ever, spoken about. They navigated this silence outside the family home too; for many years, this complex mental health condition was treated as an open secret.
Part memoir, part deep-dive investigation, The One Thing We’ve Never Spoken About is filled with rage at how our nation’s public discourse, emergency services and healthcare systems continue to fail so many people. It is also a work of care, telling the little-heard stories of people who live with these conditions and work at the front lines of mental health.
Anna’s always had too many feelings. Or not enough feelings – she’s never been quite sure. Debilitating panic. Extraordinary melancholy. Paranoia. Ambivalence. Fear. Despair.
In this sharp-eyed and illuminating memoir, award-winning writer Anna Spargo-Ryan pieces together the relationships between time, mental illness, and our brain as the keeper of our stories. Against the backdrop of her own experience, she interrogates reality, how it can be fractured, and why it’s so hard to put it back together.
Axolotl Archives 