Hi, my name is Phoebe Kingston, I'm the owner, principal author, instructor (Head Hare) The Warren Academy. I'm in my late firties and I'm still figuring things out. I’ve a long-lived experience of distress and thriving, I’m a lived experience PEER, a mother, I’m chocolate, leopard print, and Hello Kitty obsessed, I’m a lover and a fighter! I believe that navigating our lives, our wellbeing, and especially navigating the 'mental health' system, is at times, like going down a rabbit hole ('Thru the Rabbit Holes' was the name of my lived experience consultancy business). It's been my dream to build this site, the World Wide Warren, to support people to experience a journey of discovery that is meaningful and useful to them in this challenging world. I'm 47 years young and I'm still filled with curiosity for the world, I refer to this site as the 'World Wide Warren'. I don't like the term 'online school' so much as a the term 'exploratory platform'.
Once upon a time, my dream was to become a medical doctor and after two years of studying, receiving four awards, including the National Australian Adult Learner's Award and an academic Valedictorian Award, I applied for entrance to medical school with a tertiary entrance ranking in the 97th percentile for Western Australia. However, the stress of studying brought about a change in me, but unaware of the warning signs, I sat my medicine entrance exam in 2007. However, instead of entering medical school, I entered a psychiatric hospital.
Following a ‘damning psychiatric diagnosis’ I struggled with almost every area of life for several years but in general, I disguised it well (and some days, less well). I finally began to ‘recover’ in late 2011. I prefer the term 'discovery' to 'recovery' and I believe that my unique journey to find myself was/is really a form of re-identification, reinvention, and ultimately remembrance. I postulate that this is a fourth type or sub-category of ‘recovery’ after clinical, social, and personal 'recovery' frameworks. REIDENTIFICATION is an acronym for a 16 step program, and I’ll be writing an academic paper on my theory and principles.
I began my lived experience (LE) peer worker career as a volunteer public speaker, sharing my story. From this, I discovered a passion to speak out on a subject that has been taboo for too long, and so my public speaking profile was born. It evolved to conference speaking and being a keynote speaker on a few occasions.
During my personal journey to recover my mental and emotional wellbeing, I found volunteer work enormously fulfilling, it instilled within me a sense of belonging and wanting to contribute to causes that I deeply cared about. In 2014, I was nominated for a Volunteer of the Year Award (Volunteering WA) and my life started to come together. During the earlier years of my struggles, my positive and negative experiences of trying to rebuild my shattered life, my broken dreams, it was my efforts to support charitable organizations that ignited my passion for a 'mental health' service-user movement and the power of the lived experience voice.
In 2014, the Western Australian Government created eight new peer support positions for six community 'mental health' clinics, the first such positions in the North Metropolitan Mental Health Service (NMMHS). I was appointed to one of these pioneering positions, which were a significant step in the ‘consumer’ movement in Western Australia. Embedding that first public system LE peer support service and workforce was a large undertaking for us, and not without immense challenges. I remained in the frontline peer support role for 5 years and concurrently, I completed a leadership certificate through the WA Department of Health, and worked in a related advisory and governance role for the North Metropolitan Health Service (NMHS).
Next, I moved onto working as an independent LE consultant, advisor, trainer, speaker, and group facilitator for the 'mental health' sector.
I thoroughly enjoyed a position as an LE academic for the School of Allied Health, Curtin University whilst I operated a small LE peer consultancy business, and now I’m the owner of The Warren Academy. Creating the World Wide Warren site and the numerous journeys of discovery and mindful emersion experiences in the Rabbit Holes has been my dream for several years.
My working background includes roles as a Board Director for Consumers of Mental Health Western Australia (CoMHWA) roles in executive representation in the public 'mental health' sector as vice chair, subcommittees chair, and project lead under the NMHS Mental Health Community Advisory Council, and a role on the briefly established Consumer Engagement Community Advisory Council (peak advisory body to the NMHS Board).
As well as being a permanent staffer at Curtin university and thriving in the teaching, assessing, and authoring occupations, I also engaged in guest lecturer positions at Murdoch University, Edith Cowan University, and North Metropolitan Tafe. In 2021, I co-facilitated a workshop with a doctor from the University of Western Australia. It was a workshop on Trauma Informed Care for the Western Australia Medical Students Association at their annual global medical student’s conference (GMC). The Global Medical Conference is a medical training and education conference provided every year for all medical schools in Western Australia. I was honoured to discover that I was the first LE academic/educator in Western Australia to teach medical students at the GMC.
I was often fortunate to be invited to work as a subject matter expert (SME) advisor for Western Australia and beyond and I have worked on several expert panels and groups including; the Australian National Media Reporting Guidelines Panel, some international panels, and Western Australian Mental Health Commission project panels such as the Western Australia Recovery College Model of Service Expert Panel, the Recovery College Tender Evaluation Expert Panel, and the Western Australia LE (Peer) Workforces Expert Group/Panel.
In late 2019, I had the new and exciting experience of co-presenting in a WA media release with the Premiere of Western Australia, Hon. Roger Cook who was the Deputy Premiere and Minister for Health and Mental Health at the time. The media release was regarding the announcement of the WA Recovery College Award of Tender. I addressed the media to express my perspectives and hopes for the WA Recovery College Alliance (WARCA). Coming from a theatrical background, I’m used to cameras, but I still nervous doing the media release!
In 2020, I was offered an opportunity to be Australia's National Stigma Report Card State Champion. Which simply meant that as a prolific West Australian peer worker. I had to get behind the project and promote it in all my working spaces and networks across the state health sector. The National Stigma Report Card was a 5 year research project by the Anne Deveson Research Centre in partnership with the Paul Ramsay Foundation. The National Stigma Report Card was both unprecedented and ambitious in several ways, it included the largest 'consumer' survey of its kind conducted in Australia to that date. It was an area of focus that meant a lot to me because I’ve endured the stigma of ‘mental illness’ in similar ways that many of us have. After having two employment contracts terminated immediately after disclosing what my ‘psychiatric diagnosis’ was, I rarely turn down an opportunity to challenge stigma, prejudice, discrimination, and oppression.
Between 2021 and 2022, I was an SME advisor to the WA Mental Health Commissions Peer Practice Expert Group/Panel for the Western Australia LE (Peer) Workforce Development Project (2021) and I’ve continued in the project this year as a member of the Lived Experience Working Group until the release of the Western Australia Lived Experience (Peer) Workforce Guidelines.
I’m a qualified LE educator, tertiary peer tutor and a certified personal medicine coach (CPMC) under Dr. Deegans' Patricia Deegan and Associates (PDA LLC Faculty, U.S.A). In addition I’m a qualified Alternatives to Suicide (Alt2Su/ATS) support groups facilitator (a U.S.A peer owned approach to suicide support models). I also worked as a national Peer Ambassador for Sane Australia for several years, and I was Co-Chair of the national Consumer Reference Group for Australia National University and the Institute of Communication in Healthcare.
As a working group contributor for the Mental Illness Fellowship Australia’s Finding North initiative (2021 to 2022) I continued to find the LE space holding many continuous learning and networking opportunities. After we launched the Finding North Website and it's LE peer only platform, the Finding North Network, aka the FNN (app' available in the Google Play store/apple app' store) I was invited to federal parliament in Canberra for a 'Parliamentary Friends of Mental Health' event. It was held in honour of MIFAs work and it was the exciting national launch event for the Finding North website, the first directory-based website of its kind, and we were also celebrating the growing success and membership of the peer only FNN platform.
I was privileged with a voice on the Everymind Words and Images Project too. It was a project from 2021 to 2023 with the purpose of reducing the stigma around the lived experience of distress and suicide related experiences through words and images, something close to my heart. It was a natural progression after I had also contributed to the National Media Reporting Guidelines in a previous year.
An exciting area for development and learning for me since late 2021 is my involvement in both research and knowledge production via my role as a sessional academic at Curtin University. I was privileged with a role in PhD research about how the LE voice and service-user perspective is included in social work student supervision in fieldwork/practice. I had a direct involvement in the supervision sessions with senior social work supervisors and their students. I am a second author (and co-author) in two academic papers regarding the research. I was also involved in a collaborative partnership project with the school’s faculty in speech pathology. I am now planning my own academic papers as lead author across a selection of interest areas in my heart.
Sometimes life throws us a curve-ball across both personal and professional domains. In 2023, I was thrown 'dissociative identity disorder' (DID). This was formerly known as 'multiple personality disorder' but renamed for clinical accuracy to avoid the misunderstanding that it’s a 'personality disorder', which it is not. 'DID' is the most acute form of trauma (even beyond 'dissociative disorder'). It is NOT a 'personality disorder' (even by clincial standards and understanding). DID is the most extreme form of disociation. I personally don't see it as a 'disorder' at all because being an LE activist who is oriented in humanizing lenses, I subscribe to a de-pathologizing school of thought, one example being the UK-based LE activist group called 'Drop the Disorder'. I am passionate about the work of Dr. Lucy Johnstone, particularly her paper about the alternatives to psychiatric diagnoses.
How did dissociative identities unfold into my life?
After burn-out, new trauma, and relationship breakdowns, I quit my LE working roles (including a huge tenure I’d just been awarded) I left my marriage, and I temporarily relocated, but soon I found myself myself homeless and living in my car. How did I do that?!
This extraordinary turn of events was because my extreme life stressors and trauma also elicited an amnesia issue that was soon discovered to be the recognizable and diagnosable exacerbation of dissociative identities, and an obvious and comprehensive out pouring of approximayely 50 alternate identity states over three and a half years (and counting...). I was hospitalized in mid-2023 as part of the process, and I have since had to try and piece my life back together.
I thought I understood trauma, especially because I’ve had PTSD more than once, but when I realised in 2023 that I’d experienced over 40 years of amnesia both suddenly and slowly lifting away, and being faced with horrifying memories, the word 'shock' doesn’t cut it. I struggle to believe that my brain has created about 50 versions of me (that I've identified so far). Over 50 parts of me captured; a perspective, a skill, a fear, an attribute, an aspect of personality (sometimes like a caricature) sometimes simply frozen in age or frozen in a traumatic state. Essentially, they're all memory maps and markers. They’re there for a reason and they all have specific functions and roles.
I had the shock of being confronted by, comforted by, and meeting my 'alters' in co-consciousness and the shock of finding out (and confirmation from friends and family) that I'd been living 'secret lives' -doing and saying things... Things that I didn’t know about!
It’s the ‘full swaps’ (the 100% dissociation) that really challenged me. If I had had the ‘passive influences’ only which is uncontrollable and disempowering enough, I might have fared better. Of course though, ‘full swaps’ are often a part of the picture. The shock of discovering that I have dissociated identities was in itself, a huge trauma, and perhaps one of the largest of my life. I've now done a great deal of work with all of myselves to the point that I have high and effective personal autonomy and empowerment.
I'm very excited for my planned professional journey in the second half of 2026, when I'll be returning as something entirely different.
My current life is a far cry from my breakdown in 2007, which is when I first thought I'd gained a huge lived experience from trauma. I'm a yawning chasm away from how I felt during many earlier stages of my harrowing and yet immensely self-empowering journey. I now understand what I 'lost' and spiritually what I forgot. I understand it for what it really was, why it was necessary for me, and what my unique lived experience has given me. I didn’t lose myself when I lost my hair in an episode of ‘mental illness’ in 2010. I had lost myself before it got to that. 
Then shortly after that, when I regained a sense of my identity and felt that I'd mastered self-discovery and self-empowered identity (even writing lectures based on that concept and lived expertise) then years later in 2023, I began discovering who I really was! I found my true identities. Deep inner work was forced on me from my unconscious, my soul.
The unconscious cannot be self-summoned or even accessed very easily by psychological professionals, but if it happens to you, it is the innermost, deepest personal wellbeing and development work. The deepest personal challenge a person can face is to face themselves and God.
In preparation for the Warren Academy long-term premium programs of asynchronous delivery, I’ll be focusing on the following areas: reflective practice: developing a teaching style, pedagogy for teaching and learning, constructive alignment: planning for teaching, active and collaborative learning: facilitating a positive and engaging learning experience, global learning environments, and much more. I am committed to maintaining my professional skills and knowledge and my dedication to my peer work and my life mission equates to me highly valuing continual personal and professional development.
With unbridled passion and commitment for all my past and upcoming work, and more specifically spiritual wellbeing, and social justice. It’s my dream to contribute all I can to this world. I believe that the meaningful improvements and self-empowerment in the lives of people experiencing mental, spiritual, and emotional distress are inevitable -you can’t stop progression!
I follow my calling as a change agent for systemic reform and spiritual ascension. I don’t have a ‘day job’, I live and breathe what I believe in. I listen, I witness, I love, I fight, I learn, I deliver what I’m asked for and more… I do these things naturally and I’ll never do anything else! I'm not here for employment, I'm here for deployment.
