Category: VTMH Seminar

On Wednesday, 2 August 2023, VTMH was delighted to celebrate the launch of the Community Engagement with Purpose Resource Project at Darebin Arts Centre.

The project commenced during Covid-19 lockdown and despite unprecedented challenges, work continued.

This launch event culminates two years of hard work by a dedicated group of VTMH project members, and an external Advisory Group, to co-design a new suite of resources to support mental health workers and mental health organisations undertake community engagement work.

A number of consultation sessions, with a range of stakeholders, also took place.

The resources produced include a resource booklet, videos, podcast series and a project report.

More information about the resources and the project can be found on our website here.

To view images from the launch event, click on the video below:

VTMH is excited to announce that we will be holding our first forum since 2019 on Thursday, 26 October 2023 at the Darebin Intercultural Centre titled, Women Empowering Communities – Deepening the Dialogue in Mental Health and Wellbeing.

This year’s theme showcases the work women have undertaken to strengthen mental health and wellbeing in their communities.

The day will consist of dynamic presentations from a variety of community projects, including a Q&A session, a musical performance and keynotes from both Nyadol Nyuon and Mary Crooks. The event will be hosted by Tigist Kebede of Pola Practice, and will be captured in stunning detail by our graphic recorder Debbie Wood.

So, please mark your calendars for the Thursday, 26 October. This is sure to be an amazing day, and we would love to see you all there!

To ensure you are notified when registrations for this forum open, please add yourself to the VTMH mailing list here

VTMH continues to strengthen its relationship with the rural and regional mental health sector through our VTMH Rural and Regional Approach Implementation Project. 

The main aim of this project is to ensure that VTMH’s programs and services take into account the unique needs of the rural and regional mental health and wellbeing sector and that their perspectives are included across all of VTMH’s programs and services.

In 2022, we facilitated two consultations with the VTMH Rural and Regional Liaison Group who represent each of the eight mental health and wellbeing services across rural and regional Victoria. The group recommended to:

• Actively promote VTMH programs to rural and regional service centres.
• Develop and embed processes for disseminating up-to-date information about VTMH programs within rural and regional service centres.
• Adopt a whole-of-organization approach, ensuring that culturally responsive practice is seen as everyone’s business and as essential to good practice across all areas of service provision.
• Incorporate VTMH programs in training guides and related materials.

VTMH has begun to implement the first two recommendations above. We have so far travelled to five rural and regional mental health services to showcase our services. These are:

• Bendigo                                                               
• Goulburn Valley (Shepparton)       
• Laddon Mallee (Mildura)   
• Albury/Wodonga                                              
• Grampians (Ballarat)                

VTMH will showcase at Barwon Mental Health Service on Thursday, 14 September 2023 and plans to visit Gippsland (Latrobe) and South West (Warnambool) Mental Health Services in early 2024.

We are grateful for the hard work of the Rural and Regional Approach Liaison Group members in facilitating our visits. We look forward to working together on the next stage of the project.

We are delighted to announce that VTMH this year has had two workshops and a paper presentation accepted to the TheMHS conference in Adelaide from Tuesday, 15 to Friday, 18 August 2023.

This year’s conference theme ‘Making rights real – bringing humanity and human rights to mental health’ aligns with VTMH’s strategic objectives and the guiding principles that arose from Victoria’s recent Mental Health Royal Commission and which now guide the current mental health reforms.

VTMH is proud to utilise this opportunity to showcase recent project work. This will include a workshop stemming from our new Community Engagement Resource, to be presented in collaboration with a community member of the advisory group. We will also highlight our service development work through facilitated exploration of our Partners in Diversity framework in collaboration with Better Health Network.

Last but not least we are proud to present a paper titled ‘Dare to Care – Human Rights and Compassion in the Workplace’ by our lived experience consultant – Naomi Chapman.  

We wish our colleagues the best of luck sharing our work in this pertinent and meaningful forum.

VTMH continued our seminar schedule into 2022, with our seminars continuing to be held online via Zoom.

We held 8 seminars between March and November this year and were thrilled to have the speakers join us.

It has been a wonderful experience for VTMH, holding these seminars online and being able to reach people around parts of Victoria and Australia, that otherwise would not have been able to attend our face to face seminars in Fitzroy.

We started off in March with a discussion about Peer Supervision for Language Interpreters: Learnings from a Pilot Program. Facilitators of this VTMH program, Lew Hess and Radhika Santhanam-Martin discussed the learnings from this space along with interpreters Nari Kim and Susan Esmaili who participate in this reflective group for interpreters.

In April, our seminar focused on the VTMH and Spiritual Health Association’s ongoing Spirituality & Diversity Discussion space.

June hosted cohealth and a presentation on the reflections from their community led bicultural workers project.

July saw us delve back into the spirituality space with a presentation from advocates in this area titled ‘Spirituality, spiritual care, and mental health: What’s the correlation?’.

In August we heard from Dr. Trini Abascal, Rafaela Lopez OAM & Cristy Abela on the strengths and resilience of immigrants.

In September we hosted Independent Mental Health Advocacy (IMHA) and heard about their work in partnership with consumers towards a recovery and rights based mental health system.

October saw us hear from Ubuntu Mental Health and The Me + Mental Health Theater Production Project.

We ended the year with our most well attended seminar for the year, titled ‘Understanding the evidence and practicing cultural curiosity when working with children from CALD backgrounds’.

We thank everyone who attended and of course the speakers for so generously donating their time.

Our total audience numbers for seminars in 2022 was 483 and we are so happy that we were able to deliver important information to such a broad group of viewers across Australia.

Our seminars will recommence in the first half of 2023.

To ensure you are notified of upcoming seminars, please add yourself to the VTMH mailing list here

Victorian Transcultural Mental Health (VTMH) has been facilitating the statewide Mental Health & Cultural Diversity Community of Practice (CoP) since 2020.

The CoP provides a space to support mental health clinicians to come together to critically reflect on cultural diversity and mental health with peers who share the same interest.

The CoP provides an opportunity to explore contemporary practices, and have robust and respectful conversations about ways we can make our practice more accessible and responsive to the diverse needs of local communities.

The CoP is a free, ongoing program, with membership renewed annually. The group meets quarterly via Zoom throughout the year and each meeting runs for 2 hours. The CoP is open to those working in Victoria’s publicly funded mental health services. For more information on becoming a member, click here

The purpose of this monthly, one hour, online psychiatry registrar group is to promote culturally safe and responsive mental health care in clinical practice. This group provides an online space once a month for psychiatry registrars across Victoria to participate in discussions and reflections on cases involving transcultural themes.    

Meetings were held on Wednesday, 27 April 2022 and Wednesday, 25 May 2022 and we are continuing to host these sessions on the last Wednesday of each month from 2.30 – 3.30 PM.

If you are a psychiatry registrar in Victoria and interested in participating in these sessions, please email Dr. Justin Kuay at justin.kuay@svha.org.au

At the end of 2021, VTMH embarked on a project to develop a suite of resources on community engagement to support the mental health workforce. The project advisory group (membership comprising community members, community engagement officers, people with lived experience and mental health clinicians) was set up at the inception of the project. We have since undertaken 10 consultations with diverse groups of people including community members, community engagement workers, mental health clinicians and other work people with diverse lived experience. The questionnaires presented to these groups were co-designed by the advisory group.

In the next phase of the project we will analyse the transcripts, which will inform the final phase – producing resources to support the mental health workforce in their community engagement endeavours.

VTMH continued our seminar schedule into 2021, with our seminars continuing to be held online via Zoom.

We held 5 seminars between April and December this year and were thrilled to have the speakers join us.

It has been a wonderful experience for VTMH, holding these seminars online and being able to reach people around parts of Victoria and Australia, that otherwise would not have been able to attend our face to face seminars in Fitzroy. 

We started off in April with Emeritus Professor Andrew Markus AO from Monash University speaking about the findings of the Scanlon Foundation social cohesion surveys conducted in May, July and November 2020.

In June we welcomed, once again, Matt Ball from the Humane Clinic in South Australia who spoke about his “Suicide Narratives” approach which seeks to understand a person’s unique phenomenological reality and their current experience that life is unsustainable.

Matt teaches and consults nationally and internationally on humane approaches to working with a person in distress. Humane Clinic offers an alternative to pathologising and diagnosis-led mental health systems.

In August we had Professor Naomi Priest from the Centre for Social Research and Methods, Australian National University speak to us about her research into racism as a critical child and youth public health issue.

Our October seminar (which was rescheduled to December) saw us hear from Professor Rebecca Wickes, Director Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre (School of Social Sciences, Monash University).

Professor Wickes spoke to us about her research into the safety and security of refugee women in Australia which was eye-opening.

Our last seminar of the year had us hear from Feifei Liao who spoke about her work with international students and the use of innovative ways of leveraging storytelling, arts and lived experience to explore mental health challenges multicultural communities face and support them to navigate their own journey for prevention and recovery.

We thank everyone who attended and of course the speakers for so generously donating their time.

Our total audience for seminars for 2021 was 348 and we are so happy that we were able to deliver important information for such a broad group of viewers across Australia.

Our seminars will recommence in the first half of 2022.

To ensure you are notified of upcoming seminars, please add yourself to the VTMH mailing list here