Melanie Allsop is an Australian author, lived experience educator, and mental health advocate whose work helps clinicians and students understand the person behind the diagnosis. After spending much of her adolescence and young adulthood in psychiatric hospitals, she now builds resources and delivers presentations aimed at improving health care education. She holds a Certificate III in Community Services and is currently completing a Certificate IV in Mental Health at TAFE NSW.
She is the author of Beyond the Medical Record: Understanding Mental Health Care Through the Eyes of a Patient (2026) and the forthcoming memoir For the Girl I Used to Be. Her writing on patient experience, mental health care, and clinician education has appeared in Mamamia and on KevinMD.
Every resource, presentation, and book she creates is dedicated to the younger version of herself, and to every young person who deserves to be seen, heard, and understood. She shares her work on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Every first appointment with a new clinician, every first review after being admitted to a psychiatric ward, I spent less time thinking about what I wanted to say and more time wondering how I was going to answer the question I knew was coming. The question that always left me silent. The question that left me feeling as if I had already failed the conversation before it had even begun. …
Trauma-informed care starts before the first question
The longer I spent in the mental health system, the harder it became to remember who I was outside the pages of my medical record. Because when people stopped referring to me as the young girl I was, and instead as a diagnosis or simply as “the patient in bed 27,” how was I supposed to remember who I was outside those hospital walls? The staff had read through my …
Reduced to a diagnosis: I was the patient in bed 27
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