Australian Mental Health | A Clear Voice on Bipolar Disorder from Down Under - OC87 Recovery Diaries

Australian Mental Health | A Clear Voice on Bipolar Disorder from Down Under

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This month, OC87 Recovery Diaries is pleased to present a video featuring the warm and wonderful Liza Brock, a writer from Australia who penned the OC87 Recovery Diaries essay “The Bottom of the World: Living with Bipolar in Australia.”

Liza is a blogger and author of the novel Hot Chocolate in Wonderland. Both the novel and her essays use her lived experience with bipolar disorder as a starting point to engage readers, bust stigma and raise awareness about the realities and challenges of living a healthy life.

Says Liza, “That’s why I started to write. Because I wanted to get it out there that ‘Hey you know, we’re not psycho, we’re not lunatics. We’re human beings that are unwell.’”

Liza writes and speaks with passion, humor and brutal honesty.

Readers may be interested to know that Liza was a member of the chart topping 90’s girl group Teen Queens, an experience she artfully mines in Hot Chocolate in Wonderland.

Liza has written about her mental health journey with for OC87 Recovery Diaries and for BP Hope Magazine. She also has also successfully published her own online Bipolar survivor’s workbook, and her author bio says that she lives in Brisbane Q. with her husband and children under the watchful eye of Rosie the dog.

Liza was one of five international guests at the 2019 Write on the Ocean Women Writers’ Retreat that OC87 Recovery Diaries hosted in Cape May, NJ earlier in 2019.

We took the opportunity of this gathering to interview our international guests. The interviews resulted in a new OC87 Recovery Diaries video series titled “Writers Talk,” in which we meet people discussing the important relationship between writing and mental health recovery.

“I want to hear everyone else’s stories. By storytelling, by writing, you don’t feel as alone,” says Liza.

In this video, Liza speaks of her suicide attempts, attitudes about mental health in Australia, and her keys to recovery—with candor, charm and wit.

We will post interviews with each of the “fabulous five” writers featured in this special OC87 Recovery Diary series. They include Liza Brock (Australia), Claire Eastham (England), Florence Mukangenzi, (Rwanda), Pinar Tarhan (Turkey), and Sanjukta Chauhan (India).

We hope you’ll enjoy getting this international perspective on writing and mental health. We know you’ll enjoy meeting these terrific, articulate women.

 

EDITOR IN CHIEF: Gabriel Nathan | EDITOR: Glenn Holsten | DESIGN: Leah Alexandra Goldstein | PUBLISHER: Bud Clayman

See Related Recovery Stories: Bipolar Disorder, Mental Health Short Films

Glenn is an award-winning director who loves to create compelling documentary story experiences of all lengths for screens of all sizes. He is an avid reader, studied literature in college, and his passion for stories with strong characters and interesting narratives stems from those years. His career as a visual storyteller began at WHYY (the public television station in Philadelphia) where he worked for 15 years before becoming an independent filmmaker. In addition to his PBS documentaries about arts and culture, he has directed films about justice and human rights, and now, mental health. He was emboldened to undertake his current documentary project, Hollywood Beauty Salon, a colorful feature-length documentary about surviving mental illness and finding the courage for recovery, after his transformative experience directing OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger’s Movie, along with Bud Clayman and Scott Johnston.

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