Advisory Panel

Blue Knot’s Advisory Panel includes a representation of complex trauma clinicians, researchers, and academics from around Australia. The Advisory Panel brings considerable expertise, experience and networks to support Blue Knot’s thought, policy, practice and training leadership.

Lenaire Seager

Nurse - Member Executive Leadership Team Belmont Private Hospital

Lenaire Seager is a registered nurse previously working as Area Clinical Coordinator at Trauma and Dissociation Unit Belmont Private Hopsital, nowy working as the Hospital and Acute Community Service Coordinator at Belmont Private Hospital. She has been there since its inception in 1997 and has been an integral part of the ongoing development of the unit’s program. She is also interested in the research projects that often are conducted within the unit.

Corinne Henderson

Principal Policy Advisor Mental Health Coordinating Council

M. Couns. Grad Dip Couns. MA. Dip AD., CMCAPA; Clinical Member PACFA Corinne Henderson is Senior Policy Officer, Mental Health Coordinating Coundtil (MHCC), the NSW mental health peak body for non-government mental health services working towards mental health policy reform. She is a counsellor and psychotherapist providing clinical services privately and through Employee Assistance Programs. She sits on numerous state committees, advisory and steering groups representing MHCC including Justice Health Consumer and Community Group; the Health Complaints Commission Community Committee; Multicultural Mental Health Implementation Committee; and the Federation of Non-Government Associations. She is co-author of Reframing Responses, Improving Service Provision to Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse Who Experience Mental Health Problems. She is also author of Gaols or de facto mental institutions? Why individuals with a mental illness are over- represented in the Criminal Justice System in New South Wales, Australia, published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, a leading publication on research on offenders and criminal rehabilitation in the USA. Prior to her involvement in the mental health field, Corinne was a senior executive in the home textiles industry in Australia and overseas.

Warwick Middleton

Psychiatrist

Professor Middleton has had substantive ongoing involvement with research, writing, teaching (including workshops and seminar presentations), supervision, conference convening and the chairing of Medical Assessment Tribunals. He has made substantial and ongoing contributions to the bereavement and trauma literatures and was, with Dr Jeremy Butler, author of the first published series in the Australian scientific literature detailing the abuse histories and clinical phenomenology of patients fulfilling diagnostic criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder. He was the first researcher to publish systematic research into ongoing incestuous abuse during adulthood.

See his Systematic Research into ongoing incestuous abuse during adulthood.

Professor Warwick Middleton is a Fellow and Past President of the ISSTD, is Co-Chair of the ISSTD Membership Committee, and Vice-Chair of the ISSTD Scientific Committee. Prof Middleton chairs The Cannan Institute. In 1996 he was a principal architect in establishing Australia’s first dedicated unit treating dissociative disorders (the Trauma and Dissociation Unit, Belmont Hospital). He has authored many papers and book chapters and has been the co-editor of two books based on journal special issues.
He is in full-time private psychiatric practice and lives in Brisbane

Dr. David Leonard AO

Psychiatrist

MB, BS, DPM, FRANZCP, AM
David Leonard graduated from the University of Sydney in medicine in 1964 and, after working in general medicine and general practice in Sydney, Adelaide and New Guinea, entered post graduate training in psychiatry in London and Edinburgh. He returned to Melbourne, Australia in 1971. He worked in public sector services, particularly focussing on people with psychotic disorders and personality disorders. He became director of a number of psychiatric services over the next 25 years. He was actively involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and patient advocacy, through work with community organisations.Over the last 12 years he has worked in full time private practice at the Albert Rd Clinic where he is associated with the Professorial Unit of the University of Melbourne. His work there has focussed on trauma based disorders with a particular interest in dissociative disorders. In 2010 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to psychiatry.

Judy Atkinson

Emeritus Professor

BA (Canberra) PhD (QUT)
Emeritus Professor Judy Atkinson is a Jiman (from Central west Queensland) / Bundjalung (Northern New South Wales) woman who also has Anglo-Celtic, and German heritage. Previously Head of College: Gnibi the College of Indigenous Australian Peoples at Southern Cross University her major academic focus, and the extensive work she has conducted within Indigenous communities across Australia, in Timor Leste, and Papua New Guinea, has been in the area of violence and relational trauma, and healing for Indigenous, and indeed all peoples.
She developed the We Al-li / Indigenous Therapies Program, designed to address the critical needs of Indigenous communities around violence / trauma / healing, and co-authored the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on Violence Report, for the Queensland government. Her book: Trauma Trails – Recreating Songlines The transgenerational effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia, provides context to the life stories of people who have moved/been moved from their country in a process that has created trauma trails, and the healing that can occur as people make connections with each other and share their stories of healing.
She is now Patron of the We Al-li Trust. In future years she hopes to focus on her responsibilities as a Board member the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healing Foundation; and researching in Australia, Timor Leste, supporting the development of an evidence base on education-as-healing in community change processes, in response to historical, social and cultural trauma and recovery.

Dr Anthony James Korner

Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist

M.B.B.S. (Hons.), M. Med. (Psychotherapy), F.R.A.N.Z.C.P.
Anthony Korner works in Sydney as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in both public and private practice. He is Coordinator for the Master of Medicine (Psychotherapy) Program at the University of Sydney and is active in teaching and research as well as clinical practice. His research interests are in psychodynamic psychotherapy, linguistics and philosophy. He has published approximately thirty papers in journals and books. He is on the National Health and Medical Research Council Committee for the development of a guideline for the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. He is the Australian representative on the World Council for Psychotherapy and was chairman of the organizing committee for the 6th World Congress for Psychotherapy, held in Sydney in 2011.

Martin Dorahy

Associate Professor

PhD, DClinPsych
Martin Dorahy is a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of Canterbury. He has a clinical, theoretical and research interest in complex trauma and dissociative disorders, their phenomenology, and cognitive and affective underpinnings. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and Co-edited two books in the area of psychotraumatology (Traumatic Dissociation: Neurobiology and Treatment, 2007, American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc; Psychosis, Trauma and Dissociation: Emerging Perspectives on Severe Psychopathology, 2008, Wiley Press). He is on the Research Advisor Panel of the Cannan Institute, Chair of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation’s David Caul Graduate Research Award and Co-editor (with Onno van der Hart, PhD) of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation’s Newsletter. Along with his academic and research work, he maintains a clinical practice focused primarily on the adult sequelae of childhood relational trauma.

Dr Jan Ewing

Clinical Psychologist

PhD, MCP
Dr Ewing has a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Melbourne and a Ph.D in Clinical Neuropsychology from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She is a member of the APS College of Clinical Psychologists and a founding member of the College of Clinical Neuropsychologists. She is also a founding member and Fellow of the Australian Society for the Study of Brain Impairment and a member of numerous other national and international societies, including, the International Neuropsychological Society, the Australian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the International Society for the Study of Dissociation, and associate member of the Australian Society of Hypnosis. She has served as Chair of the Queensland Branch of the College of Clinical Neuropsychologists and President of the Australian Society for the Study of Brain Impairment and as a member of the Queensland Professional Conduct Review Panel and the Queensland Nursing Council Health Assessment Advisory Panel. She has given lectures and workshops around Australia and currently provides annual lectures in medico-legal expert testimony and ethics in the post-graduate clinical psychology programme at the University of Queensland. Having worked in various settings across three countries and three states in Australia, she now works in full time private practice in Brisbane. Her practice includes both assessment and treatment of a broad range of disorders, including both clinical psychology and neuropsychology referrals. She has specialised for over thirty years in the treatment of post-traumatic syndromes, particularly those relating to military service and childhood sexual abuse.

Carolyn Quadrio

Adjunct Associate Professor School of Psychiatry UNSW

Carolyn Quadrio is also in private practice in Forensic and Child and Family Psychiatry, particularly in relation to sexual and intrafamilial violence and Family Law. She teaches individual psychotherapy and marital and child and family therapy. She was formerly Chairperson of the Binational Committee for Advanced Training in Psychotherapy for the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and Director of Mental Health Services with Corrections Health Service in New South Wales, Australia. She is well known for her research on women in psychiatry and sexual abuse of patients in therapy. Her current interests include prevention of childhood abuse and the role of trauma in relationship to psychiatric disturbance.

Russell Meares

Emeritus Professor

Professor Meares is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Sydney University. He trained in Psychiatry at the Maudsley and Bethlem Royal Hospital, London where began a partnership with Robert Hobson, in developing the Conversational Model, a mode of psychotherapy suitable for treating personality disorder. This model is built around the nature of self and trauma systems with its theoretical basis in experiential, neurophysiological, development and linguistic data. The main ideas underpinning the model are found in his books, “The Metaphor of Play,” “Intimacy and Alienation” and “A Dissociation Model of Borderline Personality Disorder.” He was the foundation chair of Psychiatry of Sydney University at Westmead Hospital, 1981, Foundation President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychotherapy in 1989. He has about 250 scientific publications.

Dr Richard Benjamin

Adult public mental health service

Dr Richard Benjamin finished his Psychiatry training with the RANZCP in 2001, and his Adult Psychotherapy training in the Conversational Model of Meares and Hobson – largely a therapy that addresses the adult sequelae of childhood trauma – in 2009. He is particularly interested in the recognition and management of the long-term sequelae of childhood abuse in adult patients presenting with serious mental illness, the benefits of incorporating an understanding of both trauma and relationship in therapeutic responses, and the mental health response to this patient group in general. He is also interested more broadly in the system as it impacts upon all patients suffering with mental illness. In community work this particularly involves the importance of the therapeutic relationship, issues of continuity of care and of carer, and the related benefits of the “in-house crisis team”. In inpatient work he is also interested in the role of therapeutic engagement, and in the reduction of seclusion and restraint. He is the Principal Editor of Humanising Mental Health Care in Australia: A Guide to Trauma-informed Approaches, a multi-author textbook on the subject of trauma, published by Routledge in 2019.

Dr Jan Resnick

Senior Psychotherapist

Dr Jan Resnick is a Senior Psychotherapist and (Past) Founding President of the Psychotherapists & Counsellors Association of Western Australia, (Inc.), Founding Director of Training of The Churchill Clinic (Inc) (1991-2008) – a Registered Training Organisation and a Registered Health Promotion Charity, Editorial Advisory Board member of the national journal Psychotherapy in Australia since 1993, current Clinical Member of the PACFA Register (the Psychotherapists & Counsellors Federation of Australia), Accredited Supervisor (of Psychotherapy) by the Royal Australian New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, and a regular contributor to the RANZCP Section of Psychotherapy conferences.

Dr Johanna Lynch

Founding Director of Integrate Place

Dr Johanna Lynch is founding director of Integrate Place, a multidisciplinary clinic providing whole person care for adult survivors of childhood trauma and neglect in Brisbane, Queensland. She was awarded a PHCRED Fellowship at UQ which led to research culminating in a paper published in Social Science and Medicine in Jan 2012, entitled “Beyond Symptoms: Defining primary care mental health assessment priorities, process and content.” She is a General Practitioner and finished a Post Graduate Certificate in Grief and Loss through UQ in 2007 and ‘Introduction to Dissociation’ course through the ISSTD in 2011 as well as ongoing professional development in trauma and attachment. Dr Lynch is a Fellow of the RACGP and Member of the Australian Society of Psychological Medicine and the Cannan Institute.

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