My first post-graduate job wasn’t the recliner-couch-and-tissues version of psychology most people picture.
I spent the early years of my career assessing people convicted of some of Australia’s most serious violent and sexual offences. These were cases that often made headlines.
My role wasn’t to judge people. It was to understand them.
I assessed psychological functioning, treatment progress, risk and the factors relevant to rehabilitation and reintegration. That meant listening carefully, sometimes to deeply
confronting accounts, while remaining focused on the one thing I was there to do: understand the person sitting in front of me.
I don’t play poker, but I’d probably be alright at it after that chapter. You learn not to react. You learn to stay curious. You learn that understanding and condoning are two very different
things.
One lesson emerged again and again.
People are often far more complex than the labels attached to them.
The pathways to serious offending can involve trauma, developmental disability, distorted beliefs, impaired judgment and many other interacting factors. None of those things excuses
the harm caused, nor does it lessen the suffering of victims and their families. But understanding those pathways is essential if we want to reduce future harm rather than simply react to it.
That experience fundamentally shaped how I think about people. Labels can sometimes become barriers to understanding.
Lessons behind razor wire
My next chapter didn’t get any gentler.
After forensic psychology, I moved into refugee and asylum seeker mental health. My role took me to immigration detention facilities in mainland Australia and to an offshore
processing centre on Manus Island, where I supported people seeking asylum who were living in detention.
The work there was not a brief visit. Each rotation involved flying in, spending several weeks in an exceptionally challenging environment alongside security and other support staff, and
then returning home with a deeper awareness of the experiences people had entrusted me to hear.
I completed my first rotation just weeks after the offshore centre opened, when staff were still being accommodated aboard a converted navy vessel. There, I worked closely with people
who had experienced significant trauma before arriving in Australia, often compounded b displacement, separation and prolonged uncertainty about their future.
That experience reinforced a lesson forensic psychology had already taught me: the people society finds easiest to overlook often have the most misunderstood stories.
Much of the distress I encountered was interpreted as difficult or challenging behaviour. Yet beneath it there was often grief, trauma, prolonged uncertainty or the profound experience of
living between languages, cultures and systems.
I increasingly found myself asking not, “What’s wrong with this person?” but “What has happened to them, and what barriers are preventing them from being understood?”
That question would eventually shape everything I built next.
Building a business
The common thread running through forensic psychology, asylum seeker and refugee mental health, and later work with Australian families was impossible to ignore.
People from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds were often being misunderstood at exactly the moment they most needed support.
So in 2019, I founded Mindspace Consulting.
Today we provide psychological assessment and therapy across several languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese. Our work includes autism and ADHD assessments for
adults and children delivered through a culturally informed lens.
In our experience, that culturally informed lens matters.
For many migrant and culturally diverse families, seeking mental health or developmental support is not a straightforward process. Stigma, limited knowledge of available services,
language barriers and unfamiliarity with Australian health and disability systems can all contribute to delays in accessing appropriate care.
Our clinicians regularly see the consequences of these barriers in practice.
Sometimes neurodevelopmental differences can initially be attributed to language barriers or cultural adjustment. Sometimes families have spent years trying to navigate unfamiliar
systems without clear guidance. And sometimes parents seeking answers for their child recognise, for the first time, similar experiences in themselves.
Supporting people to better understand themselves, through culturally responsive assessment and care, has become one of the most rewarding parts of our work.
A creative life beyond psychology
Alongside my professional work, I have maintained a longstanding interest in fashion, photography and visual storytelling.
More than a decade ago, I began sharing fashion and lifestyle content online as a personal creative project. Growing up, I was often told that I was not the creative one in the family,
and the account became a way to challenge that assumption and develop a creative voice of my own.
Over time, that personal project grew into an online community of more than 100,000 people.
Although this creative work remains separate from my clinical practice, it has been an important creative outlet and a reminder that our abilities and identities are not fixed by how
others initially perceive us.
What it all has in common
Whether I’m working with someone involved in the justice system, a person seeking asylum, a migrant family navigating mental health care or someone questioning what they’re capable
of, I’ve come to the same conclusion.
People are rarely as simple as the labels placed on them.
We instinctively sort people into categories. Difficult. Dangerous. Unmotivated. Creative. Not creative.
Real life is almost always more complicated.
That belief became the foundation of Mindspace, and it’s how I try to lead.
You build a practice the same way you work with people: by resisting easy assumptions, staying curious a little longer and remembering there’s always more to someone than the first story you hear.
It takes more time.
In my experience, it’s also the only approach that has consistently led to meaningful understanding.