Rory is a Social Worker and Psychotherapist located in Adelaide, South Australia. He specialises in compassionate and non-diagnostic approaches to working with people who experience hearing voices, psychosis, alternative realities, contemplation of suicide, and other often misunderstood expressions of distress and survival. He also works with young people, people managing their relationship with drugs and alcohol, and people contemplating questions of an existential nature.

Rory is passionate about standing up alongside people who have experienced injustice in the mental health system. Over the past seven years he has developed and trained other professionals in his approach to advocating for people’s rights under the Mental Health Act, particularly in relation to inpatient treatment orders and community treatment orders and guardianship orders at the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (SACAT).

Rory’s practice is guided by the principle that what is often labelled as symptoms of ‘mental illness’ can be more meaningfully understood as inherently human responses to what has happened, and what is happening, in a person’s life.

Rory offers a therapy relationship that prioritises the autonomy and wisdom of the person he is working with, acknowledging that the endeavour of building new understandings by narrating our experience of existence requires the unwavering attention of another human being. This way of working draws upon approaches such as Radical Social Work, Dissociachotic theory, the Power Threat Meaning Framework, Suicide Narratives approach, Just Listening approach, the Maastricht Hearing Voices approach, and the Hearing Voices movement.

Rory holds a Bachelor of Arts (History, Political Science and International Relations) from the University of Western Australia and a Master of Social Work from Flinders University. He is a co-director of the charity Just Listening Australia. Rory spent seven years as a therapist at Humane Clinic, an experience which provides the foundation for his clinical approach. He continues to work closely with, and learn from, his former Humane Clinic colleagues Matt Ball and Bernadette Maywald.