by Amanda Tattersall

We are all different, but some of us are different in ways that you might not be able to easily see.

This might be because someone’s brain is wired differently – like for people who are autistic, ADHD or dyslexia. Or, it might be because someone lives with a mental illness – anything from depression to anxiety, to bipolar or schizophrenia.

Modern society argues that these differences are medical conditions – often diagnosed by doctors and supported by health professionals. But seeing bipolar or autism as a private health condition can hide the ways in which public life makes a big difference to how you live your life.

Over 25 years ago, Judy Singer, an Autistic public intellectual in Sydney argued that we need a new social movement. She coined the term neurodiversity to express that we needed to be able to improve public life – spaces like schools, work, social services and community organisations – so they recognised and made space for differences that you might not see. In similar ways, mental health consumer advocates have for decades argued that public life needs to recognise its responsibility in triggering or supporting mental health.

What are we doing?

The Sydney Alliance want to take these ideas and build a community of people ready to make public life better. To do this:

• We see that our first step is to draw together a diverse community of leaders, rich with people with lived experience and connected to large impactful organisations. 
• To do this we are planning a series of workshops beginning on 24 August and running through to October 2023 that are face-to-face in Sydney and hybrid, where people can come, connect together and explore what it might look like to make public life better. 
• To make that happen we have set up a research-action team that is steering this work, and a bunch of smaller working groups that are doing research and making plans for workshop sessions on different aspects of public life (work, school, social services, social change and civil society).
• We are looking for people who might like to get involved in these teams, either by helping them prepare for workshops and/or help run a series of online table talks (small group conversations) with people who have experiences in public life that might help us imagine the kind of change we need / practices we need to remedy

For more information about our approach

Our focus is to look at the public dimensions of mental health and neurodiversity, because we see this as a major gap in public debate.

To read more about this approach, you can read a couple of pieces by Amanda Tattersall:

• Our mental health debate needs a proper dose of crazy, in The Shot
• Our collective mental health is stuffed, and it’s more than just a medical problem in The Shot

For a background about why the Sydney Alliance is helping to lead this work – take a read of a key event that happened in October 2022.