The Power in Lived Experience in Mental Health
Featuring: Tim Heffernan – Lived Experience Deputy Commissioner, NSW Mental Health Commission.

In this 60-minute community webinar, Tim Heffernan; Lived Experience Deputy Commissioner, NSW Mental Health Commission, shares his experiences as a Lived Experience leader within Australia’s mental health system and beyond.

Gain valuable insights about: 

• How our healthcare system could look with more lived experience peer workers. 

• What lived experience peer workers are doing to drive policy and legislative change in Australia. 

• The different ways that lived experience peer workers are contributing to societal change and stigma reduction. 

Includes a 20-minute Q&A session.  

About Tim 

Tim is the Lived Experience Deputy Commissioner at the Mental Health Commission of NSW. He is an experienced Consumer Peer Worker and is current chair of Being (NSW Consumer Advisory Group). He was co-Chair of the National Mental Health Commission’s National Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Strategy Steering Committee and Deputy co-Chair of the National Peer Workforce Development Guidelines Steering Committee. This year Tim joined the Official Visitor's Program.  

Tim worked for five years in an identified Lived Experience position as Peer Coordinator with COORDINARE, the South Eastern NSW PHN and he is a founding member of the Illawarra Shoalhaven Suicide Prevention Collaborative. In 2013 he was awarded a scholarship to attend Boston University’s Global Leadership Institute to develop a seclusion and restraint reduction project, Safety for All.   

An award-winning poet, Tim co-edits on online space for ‘Mad’ writing, ‘Clozapine Clinic – The Frater Project’ in the influential Australian journal ‘Verity La’. He has published widely and performed his poetry at the Wollongong Writers Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival, the Big Anxiety Festival and at Mad Pride.