Mental Health Station

19/11/2025

Professor Pat Dudgeon has been honoured with an Australian Mental Health Prize.Since its foundation by UNSW Sydney in 2016, the Prize has honoured advocates, clinicians, researchers, peer workers and ...

17/11/2025

A scathing Productivity Commission review concludes that Australia's mental health system is failing and needs a rewrite, while warning that 500,000 Australians are unable to access the care that they need.

10/11/2025

We have released our draft WA Su***de Prevention Framework which sets the blueprint for su***de prevention over the next five years.

Feedback is open now. Visit https://brnw.ch/21wXjb7 for more information.

09/11/2025

'What If Psychology Started With the Heart Instead of the Mind?' A new study explores how Chinese and Japanese traditions of “heart-mind” ( 心 or xīn) open alternatives to psychiatry’s brain-bound models of distress and healing. Jie Yang's understanding of xīn helps re-position and re-frame what we think of as the 'psyche' in a far more relational, affective, and embodied context, outlining the radical implications of this for our understanding of several clinical conditions (such as depression and anxiety) as well as much broader social and political dispositions.

'In a new article in the Review of General Psychology, anthropologist Jie Yang of Simon Fraser University argues that modern psychology’s reliance on the “psyche” leaves out something essential. Instead of focusing on the brain or mind as the seat of distress, her research turns to the indigenous concepts of xin in Chinese and kokoro in Japanese, both usually translated as “heart” or “heart-mind.”

“Our shared interest lies in the potential for heart, rather than the psyche, to be the ground for developing a new template of psychological care,” they write.

She describes this heart-based template as both “affective, that is, embodied, sensitive to intensities of feeling emanating from heart-related distress” and “aesthetic, meaning artful and intuitive, because xin, the Chinese term for the heart, which is also the origin of kokoro in Japan, is both body and mind.”
Concepts of xin and kokoro, they note, “suggest an interdependent self, rather than a bounded, individual self, such as the one we associate with tenets of Euro-American psychology and the psyche.”

The study documents how these traditions frame the heart not only as a physical organ but as the ground of cognition, emotion, virtue, and social life. Yang and collaborators describe this approach as “aesthetic attunement”: an artful, embodied way of aligning the self with others, society, and the cosmos. They argue that heart-based care provides healing potential where psychiatric categories like depression and anxiety fall short.'

Via the excellent Mad In America. Read the full article here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/09/what-if-psychology-started-with-the-heart-instead-of-the-mind/

02/11/2025

This is the first time we are offering the Seeding Hope workshop as part of our Caring Communities program with Heart Place. We need to know numbers of attendees so please book if you are inspired to join us ....www.heartplace.org.au booking ...>https://heartplace.org.au/shop/ols/categories/caring-community

02/11/2025

Up coming Youth Mental Health First Aid ( Blended) Booking Now. Numbers are limited to 12 attendees Book now to prioritise the mental health of youth in your community - work & family and to secure your place. www.mentalhealthstation.org

22/10/2025

WA Press release re ADHD

The first WA GPs to independently diagnose and manage ADHD will start providing this care in early 2026 following an initial period of co-management with non-GP specialist mentorship.

30/09/2025

30/09/2025

The idea that trauma can be passed across generations can be a difficult to grasp. But just as trauma can be passed through generations, so can resilience.