Late Night with Hero Chris Hansen and Host yvonne Smith

Chris Hansen hails from New Zealand. Her chief qualification for this work is her own lived experience of being diagnosed, treated, locked up and coerced in the mental health system. Before her official and very public promotion to this certified status, Chris worked as a manager of a Community Mental Health Service. As a result she lost her job, home, custody of a child, all her friends and much of her personal dignity and self-respect (this was a small town, and a source of much gossip). She discovered, in the process, that the real impetus and inspiration for her journey forward did not come from the people who were paid to be there, it came from the peers who sat beside her in the smoking room, where the most life-giving conversations happened. . Over the last fifteen years she has been involved in local, regional, national and international peer support and advocacy initiatives, and in mental health sector planning and politics from a service user perspective. Other roles have included leadership within the “Like Minds, Like Mine” project (NZ’s award-winning project to counter stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness), research for the NZ Mental Health Commission, and involvement in the development of the NZ national mental health workforce development strategy. Chris was a member of the New Zealand delegation to the United Nations for the development of the Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and has served on the board of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry. She played a key role in the conception and development of a peer-run crisis alternative. Chris became interested in Intentional Peer Support then years ago when looking for non-coercive ways to support one another through difficult times and crisis. She is married to Shery Mead, the founder and developer of Intentional Peer Support, and is now the director of IPS.

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