Matt Ball is a mental health nurse practitioner and psychotherapist, facilitating psychotherapy, supervision, group work and training at Humane Clinic Adelaide. Matt’s is interested in extraordinary realities,’ psychosis’ and trauma and cultural meaning, and the human-to-human relationship approaches to personal distress and meaning. Matt has led the training of 150 staff in the Maastricht approach to hearing voices in the public mental health system in South Australia. He continues to pursue the reality of a public mental health system that does not medicalize human distress as a potentially humane and just approach to anyone of us who may seek support in the context, the existential dilemma.
He is the Founder and Co-Director of the Humane Clinic, a trainer with Blue Knot Foundation, the current chair of ISPS Australia, was awarded the 2017 Australian Mental Health Nurse of the Year and holds adjunct lecture status at Flinders Uni. Matt’s work is informed by his own lived experience of madness and unmadness, both in his personal and his professional journey. He has recently lest the public mental health system, this time as a worker, and continues to be an activist for change and exposure of the structural bullying and corruption that underpins the maintenance of the dominant discourse in Australian mental health services. In 2019 he is hoping to share the explanatory concept of Dissociachotic – as a way for people to move away from the labelling of voices, visions and other extraordinary experiences as ‘psychosis’ towards a more humane understand of legitimate human realities.
