Social Work Spotlight - Episode 13: Sarah W

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

In this episode, Sarah and I discuss her interest in grief and emotional health, helping people to feel safe and supported when faced with life’s challenges. She has published widely on the topic of hope and ambiguous loss for families of missing people and has taught in the disability space, with a research interest in missing persons, mental health and disability. In addition to her research and academic roles, Sarah offers professional supervision, training and coaching. Sarah has worked as a trauma counsellor and manager of state-wide counselling services, and received her PhD, along with the Chancellors Medal, in 2015 from the University of New England.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:· Sarah’s survey looking at the experiences of missing people who have returned - https://sydneyhealthsciences.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0Cdb1IASn1NWPGd· Didi Hirsch mental health services - https://didihirsch.org/· ECLIPSE support group for suicide attempt survivors - https://www.lifelinemacarthur.org.au/suicide-prevention· Sarah’s speaker’s reel (links to videos) - http://sarahwayland.com.au/speakers-reel-sarah-wayland/· Winston Churchill Trust - https://www.churchilltrust.com.au/· Sarah’s ResearchGate page with links to research and resources - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah_Wayland2This episode's transcript can be viewed here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R5ceAPfFIBiSBXZF5yWYVDxFRy9Kixyo/view?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight, where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode. I'm your host, Yasmeen McKee Wright, and today's guest is Dr. Sarah Wayland. Sarah is a social worker and researcher with an interesting grief and emotional health. She is passionate about helping people feel safe and supported when faced with life's challenges. She has published widely on the topic of hope and ambiguous loss for families of missing people and has taught in the disability space with a research interest in missing persons, mental health and disability. In addition to her research and academic roles, Sarah offers professional supervision, training and coaching.

Sarah has worked as a trauma counsellor and manager of statewide counselling services and received her PhD along with the Chancellor's Medal in 2015 from the University of New England. Thank you so much again, Sarah, for coming on board. I'm glad you could be part of the podcast. I'll just start by asking you to explain when you started as a social worker and what brought you to this profession. That's an interesting question. I always say to my students and my clients that I'm like Maria from The Sound of Music

and that we should start at the beginning because it's a very good place to start. I've always been interested in the stories of other people. Even as a young person, so as a teenager, I was always interested in reading memoir and particularly trauma memoir. And I don't know why it is that I was drawn to those stories, but I, you know, I was always trying to understand the way in which people live their lives and what it must be like to live inside someone else's head. So I guess I've always been striving for trying to understand things. So I went straight from school to university to do a Bachelor of Social Work. that would have been 1994. So I graduated over 20 years ago now, so in 1998, went to the University of

New South Wales, and I did a Bachelor of Social Work. But I think, I don't think I actually got the role of the social worker probably until maybe 40 and maybe over the next five years. I was 17 when I started the Bachelor of Social Work. I had a very kind of conservative Catholic upbringing. I went to an all-girls school. So I didn't really understand social determinants of health. I didn't understand the voices of marginalized people. I didn't understand what it meant to be part of a vulnerable population group.

So I feel like I've grown up alongside being a social worker. When I got to the end of my social work degree, I didn't have a very clear idea about where I wanted to work. I just thought, I'd just like to get a job and work somewhere. So I did a graduate recruitment program with what used to be called the Department of Community Services. And so I went on to be a child protection social worker, which was probably my first mistake as a social worker.

So I lasted probably about 18 months working in that role. I worked in the western suburbs of Sydney. As a parent myself now, I look back and just see the distinct levels of judgment that I had about what it meant to be a good parent and what it means to take into account intergenerational trauma, being a victim of a crime, domestic violence, poverty, all of those aspects that I had no lived experience in. I was assisting people living those lives. And I almost wish I could go back not apologize for the decisions I made because I was very focused on, you know, the paramounty principle of making sure that children were safe. But I think that the white judgment that I had

about the way in which people lived their lives was not particularly helpful. So I did child protection for a while, then I moved into the disability space, worked as a social worker for home and community care for a while. And then I decided to travel overseas. So I was a social worker in London for a year or two, working with children looked after, so children within the care system. So not frontline child protection work, but more so looking after children that had ongoing orders to remain with their foster parents. And that was really lovely to be able to take my social work degree and then travel and see the world in a way that I think if I'd just stayed in Australia, I would have had a very narrow view about all of the different lives and complexities and the different issues that people face.

So I lived in London for a while and then moved to New Zealand with my partner at the time and worked for child youth and family over there in their intake office. And I think that's where I really started to find my feet. I'd grown up a little bit more. I was probably, I don't know, 22, 23, 24 at the time. and I really started to understand that I enjoyed the listening process, that I enjoyed taking myself out of the conversation. I think when I was younger, I was always trying to put myself in the conversation,

tell people what I knew, convince people that I knew stuff. And so because it was just phone work that I was doing at child, youth and family, that had like a central intake office, I just spent a lot of time networking and really truly understanding what challenges people were going through. I moved back to Sydney. I think it must have been in 2003 or four. And I worked at the domestic violence line just as a casual position that I took on. And late one night, I was there by myself because at that time they only had one person on the phones all night long by themselves in a big building in Parabana. So I was kind of wandering around the office and reading and newspaper and I saw an ad for a position, a three-month position, a pilot position

with New South Wales Attorney General's Department, running a new service called the Families and Friends of Missing Persons Unit. And this sounds terrible, but my first thought was, I grew up with my mum telling me her theories on what happened to Azaria Chamberlain. And so I thought, oh, I've always been interested in missing people. And I applied for the job. And I got that job. and that really changed my social work life. And that was back in 2004. Yeah. And did that then get more funding after that initial three months?

Is that something you were able to continue? It did. So I started that role in February 2004. And it was a very small service. It was a two-person service. So myself was the counsellor and we had a manager. The manager had taken some rec leave the day I started, which is a very odd thing to do.

But, you know, not uncommon. She left a book on my desk. Some post-it notes that said a few families have already called because they found out that this is a new service. And best of luck. I'll see you in the way. I kind of like that way of working. So I sat, I read the book that had been left on my desk,

which was a book written by a professor in University of Minnesota. I read her book and I thought, okay, let's get going. And so I started ringing the families that had left their contact details. So what we found was very early on that there was no model of support for families of missing people. It was kind of sitting between a grief model of intervention and I knew some of that stuff, particularly working in the disability space about unresolved grief or disenfranchised grief, you know, a sense of grieving for something that hasn't actually been lost, but there's a little bit different. So I developed that idea when working with families of young children born with

complex disability. So it was taking that grief model approach, but also looking at the trauma. I had a lot of families that were highly distressed, waiting for news about people that were missing and trying to work out how they could live their lives with all of these layers of unknown, with all of these ideas about imagining what happened to the missing person, negotiating with police. Often families had never had any contact with the police before, and they were thrown in at the deep end and having to negotiate those relationships, as well as negotiating with the media.

So missing people often garner a lot of interest from the media, certain missing persons cases more so than others. So negotiating with that. And I think that I truly understood, you know, the role when it had initially been advertised was either a psychologist or a social worker could apply. But I really started to understand the unique capabilities that a social worker has in that role because I wasn't too precious to do anything outside of the kind of one-to-one counseling. So we called it a counselling service, but it was very much a case management, case support service.

I was able to do a lot of advocacy for families when they felt they weren't being listened to with the coroner's court, when they were requesting coronial inquests for missing people, when they felt that the police weren't listening to what their needs were about what they were concerned about in terms of levels of risk for the missing person. I sometimes spoke on behalf of the family to media. I was able to organise family group sessions for some of those families. because everyone was in a very different place within each family about what they thought had happened to the missing person,

how they were feeling about the missing person. So just being able to understand that the support that we offer is not just about when we sit down face to face with someone and talk through all of those layers of trauma, but understand what it means to be out there, what it means to uniquely offer somebody the opportunity to say, you listen to what the police officer is saying and I'll write the notes for you and then give those notes to the family afterwards.

Like I think social workers have that unique gift of almost being able to do everything, but knowing where those boundaries are, knowing that it's so important to be flexible and engaging with people, particularly in times of crisis, but not take away their agency from them, still give them the chance to make them. the decisions that they want to make, say what they want to say, but say, I'm standing beside you while you're doing all of that stuff. I'm not going to do it for you, but I'm going to support you while you make the decisions you need to make. And so missing kind of became the space that was the space probably that was intended for me as a social worker. And that's kind of where it all began.

Yeah, brilliant. And that then led into your PhD studies, I imagine. It did. It did. The year after I started in missing, I realized how insignificant any training opportunities had been. For me, for any of the other councillors that I spoke to that were in other states and territories outside of New South Wales, trying to offer support to families of missing people, but not knowing what resources they should be using. And so I applied for a Churchill Fellowship, which a lot of social workers kind of tend to end up in that place. So, it's a fellowship that provides funding to travel internationally to seek out information that you can't gather in Australia. And so I guess that probably switched on my researcher brain. I was pretty

bullsey back then. You know, I'd only been in the job for like 10 months, I think, before I was like, right, send me overseas and I'll find out the answers to all of my questions. And I can remember going to the interview and the panel was kind of like, I probably shouldn't say this, but the panel was like, you know, a few old white men, you know, asking me questions about, well, why do you think you know that you're the right person for this? And I said, well, no one else is doing it. So it might as well be me. And so they gave me the money. And I spent a couple of months overseas. I met with the woman that had written the book that had been on my desk the first day. I spent a week sitting with her in Minnesota and trying to understand what it was that brought her to the

sector. She was a family therapist. She was in her 70s by then. And we really started to unpack, well, if we know that ambiguous loss exists for people, how do we actually teach counselors to engage people in the counselling space in a more practical way? I kind of think of it as a more social worky kind of way. You know, these are the frameworks that you can use, but you can also add in your own expertise and your own stories. So I stayed in Missing. probably until 2011-ish. I went on to manage the unit. I did a secondman at the Australian Federal Police writing up the outcomes of my Churchill Fellowship. But I started to realize that I was getting really worn down by being the sole person that was kind of flying the flag all the time

about the fact that this vulnerable population group needed to be better understood in terms of their life outcomes, you know, their quality of life, how they lived with not knowing what happened to a missing person. And the story started to get in. I spend a lot of time talking to people about vicarious trauma now and compassion fatigue, burnout, whatever you want to call it. But I felt really worn out by the constant fight and the constant need to be the storyholder. So many families had known me for so many years because a lot of those long-term missing persons cases remain long-term for a long time because it's very difficult to resolve a long-term missing person's case when there's no new information about where the person might have been or if that person is deceased where their body

actually is and who's going to share that information. So as much as I loved being part of that community. There was a power imbalance. These families almost sometimes embraced me as if I was an extended family member of theirs. When I had my daughter, you know, they crocheted cardigans for her and they threw me a baby shower and, you know, it's a very supportive environment to work in, very different than child protection. You know, nobody kind of chased you away from the front door when you were missing persons. But I just got worn out by the stories and being everything to everyone. Not that they were asking me to be that, but yeah, I realized that I still wanted to work in this space, but I wanted to be one step removed. And I often talk, I do a lot of clinical supervision

now with social workers and groups of social workers working in trauma. And being one step removed allows you to take that hat off at the end of the day and not feel like. like you're so heavily invested in the stories of the lives of the people that we work with. So that was kind of where the PhD idea started. Okay. And then how did your PhD lead into teaching? I actually, and I always say this, my supervisor for my PhD is Professor Miff Maple. So MIF is a leading suicide researcher in Australia.

and I always base my rememberings on when I was pregnant at different times. And so I must have been pregnant with my son. So I spent 2009 or 2010. And I bumped into her at a suicide prevention conference. And we'd actually done our undergraduate degree together back in the 90s. I bumped into her. I talked to her about the work I was doing. I talked about wanting to potentially do my master's.

And I thought she might have some of the answers for me. wanted someone to say, hey, do this next in your career. You know how you just kind of want someone to fix it for you. Guide you. Yeah. And so I spent a couple of years throwing some ideas backwards and forwards for her and then she became my PhD supervisor and I started. And so because I had a PhD scholarship, you can only work 10 hours a week on a PhD scholarship. And so she started giving me some teaching work in the School of Social Work at University of New England. And I realized how much I loved, particularly the first years, you know, to be able to, I could still remember so completely how much I felt like I'd fallen into the deep end

with all of these weird and wonderful ideas about the world, passionate advocates, people that were activists for different type of population groups. and I really liked the idea of both teaching new social work students but also supporting them through the process because there's so many triggers when you learn to be a social worker. There's so much stuff that you learn about yourself, almost more than you learn about the clients that you might work with or the places that you might work. You really start to unpack what your core values are and who you are and what you stand for and also see the shit that might have happened for you in your life growing up.

You know, you start to recognize, oh, wow, that was really significant that. I hadn't ever had the time to process that. I think the social work degree kind of really strips you open a little bit, you know, and makes you ponder who you are and what you stand for and what you'd like to do with your life. So that's where I kind of got into teaching. I did that all the way through my PhD. And then when I got to the end, I, you know, the kind of trajectory for some people when they finish a PhD is really focusing

on the next research project. Until I tried that for a little while, I went to University of Sydney. I started working on some mental health recovery projects there because it's very difficult to continue on your little niche because you're kind of the only one that's interested in your niche. Right. So my niche focus on my PhD was the complexities of high. hope for families of missing people. And so it was kind of nice to take a break from that missing

component for a while, make some more connections at other universities. I then went on to do a postdoc fellowship at the University of Technology in the Centre for Population Health, looking at young Aboriginal women in prisons and what the kind of through care process might look like if we better fund it, what it means to return to community and how to better resource community in a way to offer that type of person-centered, culturally sensitive care. So I did that for a while, but I wanted to come back to teaching. And so that was when I got a permanent position at University of Sydney in the Faculty of Medicine and Health.

So I kind of split my life in two ways now, where I teach health science as students. I actively chose not to step into a social work role at Sydney. I'm really interested in health promotion and online resourcing and mental health promotion and suicide prevention promotion. And health sciences work allows me to teach students about understanding how to communicate effectively with those vulnerable population groups. And also think about, I guess, who the next generation of health workers are going to be and how to make them a little bit more engaged in terms of the kind of community

citizens that they have to be. Sure. Yeah. One of the things I love about social work is that there is never a typical day, but perhaps you can run me through what your role entails currently. Sure. I feel like I have the best of both worlds. So my permanent position at Sydney is a 0.6.

So it's three days a week. My partner and I have four kids together. So it allows me to, you know, not neglect my duties as a mum because I take that job just as seriously as I take the other jobs that I do. I work 10 hours a week with University of New England still in their school of social work, not teaching, but progressing some really innovative suicide prevention research projects. We're just about to finish up a three-year study looking at providing support to people who suicide attempt through psychoeducation groups.

And then those little bits of hours I have left, I think, you know, from a full-time load, I've got about four hours left a week. I work privately as a clinical supervisor and also as a health writer. So my typical day is odd. I don't work a standard nine to five. And that's not because I'm overwhelmed with work and I have no boundaries. It's just that's the way I like to work. I start late and I finish late.

I always have a couple of hours off in the afternoon to pick up my kids from school and chat with them. And the benefit of COVID means that because it's all online, it's a little bit more flexible. We don't have to, there's no commuting, there's no turning up in places. But my typical day usually is some type of engagement with students. So at the moment, I teach a new disability major that's being run at University of Sydney that's open to all students across the university. about ensuring that we switch on understanding that lifespan development isn't normative, that there are, you know, we don't call them non-normative,

but just that if 20% of the population live with a disability, why is lifespan development so focused on the shoulds, you know, the milestones that were supposed to hit? So I have some type of engagement with students. I use a lot of lived experience narratives in all of my teaching, So I have a really wide network of people that I rely on to help me teach my students. Because I don't live with a disability, I can teach them only so far. And then I like to complement that with the stories of others.

So I do a lot of recording of other people's stories, conversations with people, making sure that I'm not doing tokenistic inclusion of lived experience, but true inclusion of lived experience. And that means paying people for their lived experience work that they do, not just expecting that they volunteer their time. I do a lot of qualitative research interviews every week. So most of my day is kind of split nicely between a little bit of teaching engagement with students.

I do student liaison academic work, which means supporting students through their university journey. So there's usually one crying student a day that just needs a little bit of a pep talk. So I don't mind being that person. I do that. I do some qualitative research work, and I always like to find some time to write. So I am always on the go with different journal papers that are in different various states of dysfunction, trying to kind of corral them into some words that make sense.

And any health writing I do is really just about taking the research work that I do and making sure it's translated to the community in a way that's meaningful. So I write for magazines and websites. So I like to do a bit of writing because it's quite, it's calming and it feels like I'm doing something with the work that I'm doing rather than doing it and kind of locking it away. So that's kind of my typical day. That makes sense. What would you say is the most challenging part of that work that you do?

As much as I've been working in this space for like 20 years, the stress or the getting in of stories sometimes accidentally creeps up on me when I least anticipate that it will. So sometimes I realize I've been, sometimes I've scheduled too many interviews in one day or I've set myself too many tasks that I think I can achieve without adding in any thinking time or pondering time. So the challenge sometimes is that sometimes it all looks interesting. And so I go, yeah, cool, I'll do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

and then all of a sudden everything's due at the same time. And with writing, you can't just set aside time to do it. Some type of magical unicorn dust from the world all needs to conspire for good writing to happen. So you can't just go, well, I've set aside three to four to write that because you sit down and sometimes the words aren't there. You know, I go to write something and I think it just it doesn't work or it's not, it doesn't feel like. It's fermented enough in my head for me to write it down. So the challenges can be that I get over-excited a bit too much and I over-commit, or I forget to factor in, you know, a walk to be able to think about something that's just happened.

Or I haven't anticipated that because with every research interview I do, I don't know what the person's going to say to me when I speak to them. So I need to factor in some time to let it sit because sometimes the interviews can be significantly traumatising. And I have to ensure that I use all of those self-care strategies that I have where I write a lot of reflective field notes. I have two other academics who are also social workers that I ring and just vent and go, that was a really random interview or that person said this most bizarre thing and I just need to. to talk it through with someone else, or just factoring time to lie in the lounge and watch a movie with my kids. So the challenging part is, no matter how much I think I'm good at looking after myself, sometimes it creeps in at times when I least expect it.

I would have expected that some of the professional challenges would have been around uncertainty, especially with some of the people you've worked with in the past, in missing persons, and then translating that to the uncertainty of recovery or hope for people with a disability and then needing to support others. You mentioned police and media and other people, but I feel like what you've described really translates well to teaching and to working in the disability and health sciences space because you've taken all of those learnings and all of that experience into a different sphere

and it's a really translatable expertise and knowledge strength. And perhaps that's how you're showing your work. in other ways. You talked about when you were a newer social worker and you felt like you needed to be at the forefront and really demonstrate very objectively where you fit and what your place was. And now you've kind of been able to sit back a little bit and go, well, I'm going to let my experience speak for itself in the way that I'm carrying out my work. Very much. Sounds really powerful. Yeah. I think what I really learned to unpack a lot, particularly in those early days working and missing, is how rubbish I was at tolerating the unknown.

And, you know, we say it so much in the work that we do and how we train to be social workers and about holding space for people and being okay with not knowing the answers. Learning that and thinking about it is very different than doing it. And I think there's been so many connections that I've noticed lately with everything that people have talked about in terms of lockdown and social isolation and COVID

about not knowing. when this will end and how this will end is a really difficult concept for people to get their head around. And we aren't good at ambiguity. You know, all the families that I've worked with have very much talked about, well, this isn't the way that it's supposed to be. If someone's lost, then they get found, and that's the end of the story. And when the universe says to you, everything that you thought in terms of the social contract of how life is supposed to work, when it suddenly shows its insecurities and there's no simple fix, then you start to think, well, if that's not right, then what about all the other stuff that I hold dear? Does that

mean that stuff isn't right? I've done a lot of writing over the last year, nothing that I've published, but just writing for myself because it's interesting what you're saying about, you know, using that skill set and applying it in other places. And I found last, last year my daughter and I lost my ex-husband. So he passed away quite young, so only in his mid-40s, and it's her birth dad. And it had been a very disconnected relationship, and he'd reconnected at the time of his death. And I really found that in that grief process afterwards and still continuing to grieve for the loss of him, a real sense of frustration that, oh, hang on, my clinical expertise and my research expertise is tolerating the unknown.

And suddenly I'm thrust into the unknown of where do I fit here in terms of the relationship, where do I fit in terms of am I allowed to grieve? And none of the stuff that I'd learned was useful for me. And I was like, I felt really cheated that I'd spent so much time thinking and understanding and embracing these alternate aspects of grieving. And suddenly, none of the skill set I had in my head was useful for me at the time. I kept thinking, I'm sure there's been some client I've seen over the years that said something that's similar to how I'm feeling and it wasn't. And that was really irritating because, you know, so much of what we learn as social workers is we grow into who we are because of the work that we do.

And suddenly there was a whole new concept where I was like, oh God, more learning. You know, this is really tiring. This trying to unravel, who am I in the midst of all of this? what have my clients taught me? Surely there's some journal paper that explains what it is that I'm going through and I couldn't find something that fit. And so I think it really talks to the fact that, you know, you have to be a lifelong learner as a social worker.

There's no getting to one place. There's no doing a PhD and getting to the end and being an expert. Like you never become an expert. There's no such thing as an expert. And I think that sometimes that doesn't always feel. bit I feel with the perception of me because sometimes from the outside, you know, I'm very good at talking. I'm not talking myself up, but I, you know, it's like, it's what I like to do. You know, I really like talking about what I'm learning and thinking and wrestling with.

And all of a sudden, I was silent. Like I had no way of describing what it was that was happening for me and differently what was happening for my daughter. And so the writing kind of helped me try and unpack all of that stuff. But the challenge is that you're so immersed as a social worker in the stories of others is that sometimes you don't always give yourself time for your own story. Sure. So, yeah.

I guess it reminds you that what works for one person is not going to work for the next as well. Yeah. And it's always been a favourite tagline of mine to say to families that I've met, oh, well, there's no rulebook for grief. And I'd said it so much, but I realized last year that maybe I'd said it a lot, but I'd never actually thought about it and how lonely that feels when there is no rule book. Yeah.

So, yeah, there's lots of being a social worker is never a nine to five job because it shapes the way that you see the world. And I always say to my students, when, you know, when that light bulb moment comes in, you see that they got something. Once you see something, you can't unsee it. once you learn that these stories exist out there in the community, you can't be the frivolous person that just overlooks trauma or dysfunction or whatever. Once you know it, you can't unknow it. Sure.

So, yeah, you know, as a way to externalise it, I guess, from me, it's an interesting learning experience to watch yourself go through the stuff that you've seen your clients go through. On the other side of that, then what would you say you enjoy most about your job? mentioned you love the teaching and you love seeing them grow, but what's your favorite part about that? I like that people trust me with their vulnerability. I don't feel uncomfortable in any research conversations. And I know when I'm teaching, even from a qualitative research perspective, when I'm teaching the students how to interview, they're so fixated on the interview questions or the interview schedule or what it is that we're hoping to achieve.

I'm very much a conversationalist in terms of qualitative research interviews. And I think that it allows me to get to the core of what people truly want to say in that moment in time. Any interview, any interaction you have with anyone, it's just time and space. It's what they're thinking right there. And there's always capacity for change. So I think I feel like I've created a nice space for myself where I still get to use my social work skills, but I don't have to be on the front line fighting the good fight all of the time.

And I feel like I'm far more settled in myself. I sleep better. I have more time to look after myself. I also really enjoy doing supervision with people in their workplaces because I think, you know, as an academic, it's very easy to accidentally disconnect yourself from what's happening out there in the community. And so doing supervision still allows me to get a true sense of what's happening out there without having to do it myself. So it's kind of like a cheats guide to still being aware of the state of play.

It's been really useful, particularly in COVID from a mental health perspective, to be able to get a true sense of what's actually happening rather than the media a sensationalist approach of caution, caution, you know, all of these people are going to die by suicide because of COVID. So getting a true sense of how it's filtering down to the community and hearing those voices without having to be exposed to them all of the time myself. Sure. Because you mentioned earlier about compassion fatigue and being able to hold people's stories. And you've mentioned a couple of ways such as spending time with your family that you used to decompress. How else do you look after yourself?

I see a counsellor and even when I think, oh, I've got nothing to talk about this month, I still turn up and I show up and recognise as much as I think I don't have something to say. I always have something to say. I think that it's really important to model the fact that, you know, we live our lives alongside the work that we do. And, you know, when life isn't peachy, it's hard to do the work that we do. and even if life is good, it's still hard to do the work that we do. And we can't devalue the fact that we witness so much pain for a lot of people.

And as much as that is an honour, it's also tiring at the same time. So I'm very much about, I feel like I learnt the most. Even though I've got all these trauma stories from like families of missing people and people who suicide attempt, I'm part of a project at Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and looking at the impact of trauma exposure in the workplace, when you work in the morgue, basically. So, of course, you're going to be trauma exposed,

but what that means. But I feel like I learned the most from people around their narratives of recovery. I feel like I got some top tips about how to live my life from those interviews that I did with people. And, you know, a lot of people spoke about a recovered life needing to be a more simple life, a safer life. and so when I'm overwhelmed by stuff in my personal life or when I'm overwhelmed by work,

I just strip it back to it being really simple. I think about the things that I can pare away. And COVID's been a great opportunity for that in terms of recognizing how busy I was as a parent, doing the stuff that I recognize now that my kids could have kind of cared less whether or not they did. And here's me driving around the streets, you know, every night picking up and dropping off everyone. and making sure everyone's at their activities. So I think, you know, self-care for me is really about pairing back

and being not simplistic, but just simple. Cooking and thinking and listening to podcasts that, you know, are heavy, but they teach me something. They make me stop and think, oh, me too. Or, oh, that's odd. I never thought of that, you know. And binge watching ridiculous TV shows. Like, you know, I like to.

do the stuff that's quiet and grounding that doesn't necessarily cost any money. Just, yeah, just nice interactions. And just doesn't take away a lot in terms of energy. Exactly. And that I don't have to go out and do it. I don't have to get dressed and, you know, buy active wear. Although my fashion sense during COVID has drastically decreased. You know, but I'm like, actually, I like this new way of living.

It feels calmer. It feels quieter. Nice. Since you've left university, I guess both times, what changes have you seen in the fields that you've worked within? This probably sounds a little bit judgy. Some of my friends are still working in the same organizations they started in when we finished uni. So like coming up, 22 years working in the same organization. I feel like social work always has that tension. between mature age people that come to the profession

because of some type of life experience that they've had or the need to give back. And I still see the younger social work students that say, oh, my friends say I'm a really good listener. So that's why I'm doing social work. So in some ways social work still attracts the same people. But I think it's still far more institutionalized than it needs to be.

You know, so many of the placement opportunities funnel off into big siloed organizations that are a little bit more formulate with the social work work that they do, you know, the child protection space or NDIS, even private practice, you know, those social workers that step into private practice are still having to be governed by, you know, in order to become accredited mental health social workers, they have to identify their psychological strategies that fit more with a psychology way of thinking than a social work collaborative way of working with individuals. So I feel like social work is still pushing against this idea of a black and white way of

thinking, even though the world is quite grey. Social work is great at working in the liminal space, but when we're asked to conform and explain exactly what we will do with these types of clients, it doesn't provide the space for being creative and imaginative and innovative. Right. And so I think that's why I really enjoy qualitative research because I don't have to conform to scales and, you know, filling in how many days a week do you feel this and think that. You know, I do that at the beginning of my interview so that we can capture progression over

time. But the interviews themselves allow to sing up those alternate narratives. And so I think social work over time, I think when people have to choose those options of working within those institutional organisations, they have to give up part of their creativity. And so I see a lot of pushback, particularly in individual supervision. A lot of people contact me and say, I need some individual supervision in my job, but what they actually need is some coaching to take the leap to the next job that's a little bit more creative. and people sometimes just want permission to do that or to say that doesn't sound like it's a job that suits you.

Let's have a think about what jobs might give you the scope to move around and use some of that energy that you have in a more meaningful way. So you can't disregard the fact that people need to pay their bills and have to have jobs that pay a certain amount to allow them to live in a capital city or to provide for their kids, whatever. but sometimes in terms of taking those safer social work jobs in organisations, you have to give up part of your social workiness in order to do them. Right. In addition to expanding the perception of the role or scope of social work in other organisations that might not be the more traditional ones, where do you see social work heading in the future?

What would you like to see? I would really love to see the Australian Association of Social Workers stepping into the space a little bit more meaningfully than they are. actually are. I think there's a place for ASW in terms of the important work that they do of bringing people together and having, you know, kind of like a one-stop shop because social work students, when they finish, want to still be connected somewhere. And so it's a great opportunity to offer that. But at the same time, I think that we need to be a little bit more vocal in the community. I think that when an issue happens like COVID or, you know, the current kind of the protests that are happening in terms of ensuring that there's an understanding of what Black Lives Matter means, I think we need more representation in the community that talks up the unique role of the social worker.

Because I still think we're kind of marred by that old perception of what a social worker can do rather than acknowledging that social workers, have amazing capacity to stretch themselves and advocate and to shape policy and to speak up for people who have invisible or silent voices, as well as helping those people speak for themselves. And that's so unique compared to any other allied health professional that's very much governed by their registration or what their registration says they can and can't do. Social workers have, it's like a list that's like a marshmallow, you know, that just keep, it can keep

growing and moving and being really reflective of what a group needs. I think we need a peak body that represents that complexity a little bit more. They need to be kind of banging their drums a little bit like social workers do anyways. So I think that that would be a great place for ASW to step into. Okay, a little bit more representative. Totally. And I think, sharing the voices of social workers, not just telling people what social workers can do, but placing the spotlight on different types of social work so that people want to belong to the community, so that people feel heard, and so that we have more representation, particularly in the private practice space of social workers.

They have a really unique opportunity in the community to do things that other professions can't do. Yet it's not a natural step in the mind of a GP when they're referring on for the better access to mental health care scheme to prioritise social workers for people. Great. And that's something that needs to change? Totally. Yeah. You mentioned you were working on a project through UNE. Is there any other projects or programs that you're working on that you can talk about? Yeah, definitely. I'm working on a few different projects at the moment. They all in some ways relate to trauma or death. That's kind of my area. As well as disability too, I still have an interest in disability, but I think it fits, like you were saying before, about that kind of

tolerating the unknown and singing up the alternate narratives of people's lives fit nicely across disability, trauma and mental health. So in the mental health space, I spoke before about the project that I'm working on, which is in partnership with Lifeline Australia. So we're looking at evaluating the Eclipse program, which is a psychoeducation, an eight-week psychoeducation group for people who are suicide attempters. And we're having really good outcomes for people in terms of learning to live with their attempting rather than that kind of clinical focus of removing the attempting behaviours. So that's been really lovely to work with. We're just finishing up the third round of qualitative interviews with participants at the

moment. And does that have an interdisciplinary focus, the Eclipse project? It does. It's run by usually two facilitators, one clinical and one peer worker. It kind of sings up the lived experience narrative of suicide attempting. It's run using a manual that came out of an American-based project from D.D. Hirsch, which looked at suicide survivors and what their needs are. So it's about enhancing capacity to develop better self-care skills, increasing ideas of gratitude, increasing ideas of what a safety plan looks like and making sure that it changes over time rather than it just being one plan and that's what it sticks with. But in speaking to the participants, the primary benefit of the group is bringing together

like-minded people. So the manual isn't about what happens because you meet other people with the same behaviours that you have, but that's the predominant takeaway for people, that they finally get to meet other people who can openly talk about their attempting without it being hushed or without kind of all sirens blazing when someone says that attempting is part of my coping strategies. So that's been really transformative for a lot of people. You know, some people have said like decades on from their attempting behaviours beginning, this is the first time they've been able to speak meaningfully about what they actually do.

So that's been wonderful to listen to. And is that manual something that might be used in training for health professionals and community workers? At the moment, Lifeline Australia has the, they're the only ones in Australia that have been trained by D.D. Hersch to use the model. And then we're looking at publishing the evaluation outcomes so that it can be scaled up and used in other organisations and other communities. So the pilot project that's been running for a few years now runs in Port Macquarie, in Gordon in Sydney, in Campbelltown in Sydney and in Perth in Western Australia. So we're just waiting for enough participants so that statistically we have some meaningful

data to share about the outcomes. But all of the qualitative interviews very much point to bringing people together has been the transformative experience irrespective of what they talk about each week. That's wonderful. And I guess that would enable people who are working with these people to feel a little bit more confident in having those conversations and bringing it up in the first place and helping those people to talk through what they're feeling. And part of the evaluation is I interview all of the facilitators when they finish each group and combining together their insights. We have a WhatsApp group for the facilitators to share their insights with each other

across all of those pilot areas. So it's a really great opportunity, particularly for peer workers too, to talk about the evaluation process and how you implement those interesting outcomes from running each group. So that's one of the projects. Another project that I'm just seeking ethics approval for now is an evaluation of the hospital to recovery program, which is looking at a peer worker who makes contact with people who've been in emergency departments or in the psychiatric emergency department within hospitals,

making contact with them and staying with them for six weeks after that admission about getting them more connected with services in the community and understanding what their unique needs are. And because it's from a peer worker perspective, it really pulls in that whole idea of kind of those interconnected relationships of talking with like-minded people. So we're still waiting for ethics approval to talk to those participants now. The other project I'm working on is the Victorian Institution,

of Forensic Medicine Project that I mentioned, where we're interviewing the whole of the workplace. So people that answer the phone at the front desk, people that work in the coronial data information system, people that are forensic workers in the morgue, people that assist with sharing autopsy information with families. We're looking at what the impact of trauma exposure is and what sort of events are clustered adverse reactions. So trying to build up an idea of you don't just say, well, if you work in this workplace, you'll be exposed to trauma, but understanding what the kind of straw that broke the camel's back has been for some people so that we can develop a better workplace intervention tool for supporting those people.

And then hopefully use that in some other states and territories. In terms of missing persons, I'm always trying to progress missing persons on the research agenda. It's very difficult to get buy-in from a lot of people because there's very fixed ideas about missing being just about teenage runaways when it's far more complex than that. So I have a survey out at the moment on trying to capture returned missing persons' voices because they don't exist in any of the research. Nobody has actively sought them out for understanding why they went,

why they came back, but most importantly, what their support needs were when they returned. So that's been out for a few weeks now, and I've already got about 40 responses. So that's been really nice. Brilliant. And then the final project that I'm working on is around looking at operationalising the recommendations that I made with another academic for the Royal Commission a few years ago into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, where we identified the vulnerability of children with disability and the need for quality and safeguarding frameworks

for those children within organisations that understand the unique vulnerabilities of children with disability. So we're writing that up as a book chapter at the moment when we have time. Brilliant. I think it's in many pies. Lots of pies, but lots of interconnections. So yeah, it's always nice when someone feeds back to me like you did about how similar all of those spaces are because I think sometimes from the outside looking in, my CV looks a little bit all over the place and my publications are all over the place, but there is a very strong thread between each of them in terms of what it means to honour a lived experience voice and what it means to make recommendations for how workplaces can do better.

What I might do is I can include some links in the show notes that people can then go off and do some more research and maybe even the link to your returned missing person's research. As well as I think, obviously, a thesis is a huge thing to absorb, but people might be interested in having a look at your three-minute thesis presentation. Yes, definitely. So I can put a link through to there. But if you wanted to direct anyone else to other resources for social work in this area, maybe you can send me a few links and I can pop them up.

Totally happy to do that. And my ResearchGate has all of my publications with the PDFs on them. I always make them available to people, even though technically not supposed to. Because I figure why spend all the time writing all the stuff and then... Just to have it caged. Seven people, you know, being able to read it in its lifetime. I have an e-book that I wrote last year for Australian Federal Police

that's about social work and ambiguous loss. So I'll send you that link as well. Perfect. Thank you. I'm so appreciative that you could take the time to do this. I think people are really going to get a lot of information out of what you've discussed and how interesting the work has been and, as we've said, the translatable nature of social work and the skills that you've developed over time. Particularly, I think, you know, when we start social work, people have very fixed ideas

about the social worker they'll become. And, you know, so many students panic in their fourth year about, well, what job am I going to do next year? You know, my advice to everyone is always, you just do the job that you're going to do. And then you do the next job after that. And that's as complicated as it needs to be. If it's not the right job, there are so many jobs in social work. We will never be out of a job.

So just think about what fits with you at whatever time of life you are or what kind of history you have and how you want to give back. So it doesn't need to be more complicated than that. Yeah. Well, thank you again so much. Not a problem. It's really nice to talk to you. Thanks for joining me.

week, if you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Sarah, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or you can email SW Spotlight Podcast at gmail.com. Sarah will be starting as a senior lecturer and course coordinator of the social work bachelor degree at the University of New England from October 29th. You can reach out to her through LinkedIn, her website, sarahawayland.com.com.a.u. And she's on Twitter at Sarah L. Wayland. Next episode's guest is Renee, a self-employed consultant and therapeutic life story work practitioner. She has worked as a casework specialist, including child protection and out-of-home care,

and in executive roles for the Department of Family and Community Services. I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you will notified when this next episode is available. See you next time.