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Meet our founder & our collaborators

Founder

Carrie Lumby

Carrie has worked in a broad range of Lived Experience advisory roles, providing strategic advice to senior decision-makers on how to effectively engage and partner with people with lived experience in systemic reform activity. She was the National Mental Health Commission's inaugural Director, Lived Experience - the first senior designated Lived Experience position in the Australian Public Service.

Carrie is recognised for supporting cross-sector, collaborative approaches to systems improvement, underpinned by a deep understanding of public participation principles and commitment to community-led social change. She has worked extensively in placed-based, community-building efforts on a volunteer basis.

Carrie has delivered several co-design projects for government health agencies and made substantial contributions to service innovation, including peer-led safe spaces for people experiencing suicidal distress and social prescribing as an approach to reducing social isolation and loneliness.

Carrie's expertise is grounded in her own lived experience of severe and enduring mental distress and many years of coercive and involuntary treatment within the public mental health system. Her work is further informed by a diverse professional background that includes direct service provision as a social worker and peer worker, academic research assistant, and media consultant to an academic research centre. She's also been an independent writer for 30 years, contributing social commentary and cultural critique to national publications, and a visual art curator who has curated several public gallery exhibitions.

Carrie has completed the King's Fund (UK) Collaborative Pairs program delivered through the Consumers Health Forum of Australia and undertaken a range of trauma-responsive practice training. She is a professional member of the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) and an individual practitioner member of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Australasia.

Qualifications

BA (Honours, First Class) in Philosophy, University of Sydney

Master of Social Work (with Distinction), Charles Sturt University

Contact

Call

0410 246 868

carrie@troubleddog.com

Collaborators

Shannon Calvert
Independent Lived Experience Specialist

Shannon is a Lived Experience leader renowned for her principled dedication to collaborative approaches to national systemic reform and service innovation across eating disorders, mental health and palliative care. Her deep commitment to systems change is motivated by her own lived experience of a longstanding, severe and enduring eating disorder and experience advocating for her mother's right to palliative care.

As a Lived Experience Educator, Shannon regularly consults with clinicians, researchers, and services to develop professional understanding of compassionate, person-centred approaches to care through a lived experience lens. Shannon is also a trained peer worker with experience as a Lived Experience supervisor and peer mentor. She is currently co-chairing the Eating Disorders Peer Workforce Guidelines Working Group.

Shannon is the Lived Experience & Co-Production Co-Lead for the Australian Eating Disorders Research and Translation Centre. She has previously held positions on several national and international boards and committees, including as an Executive member for the Australia New Zealand Academy of Eating Disorders, Consumer Co-Chair of the National Mental Health Consumer and Carer Forum, and the Board of Directors of Palliative Care Australia.

Martina McGrath
Martina McGrath Consulting

Martina McGrath is a Lived Experience leader recognised for her contributions to lived experience informed system change in suicide prevention. She is the founding co-chair of the International Association of Suicide Prevention’s LGBTQA+ Special Interest Group.

Martina is currently completing a PhD through the Centre for Mental Health, School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. The focus of her thesis is suicidality disclosure in the workplace and the role that stigma and discrimination play in informing and influencing disclosure and non-disclosure decisions by workers. She also contributes to a number of other research projects that broadly focus on social equity issues, such as those faced by people who experience suicide-related or mental health challenges.

Prior to moving into public health research, Martina worked across both suicide prevention and mental health in a variety of roles, including lived experience practice mentoring and supervision. Martina’s rights-based approach to systemic advocacy is informed by her life-altering and ongoing lived experiences which stem from adverse childhood experiences, dissociation, self-harm, including suicidality, substance misuse and harmful and oppressive systems responses involving restrictive and coercive treatment.