A young Gippsland woman who survived a childhood of severe family violence, housing instability and trauma is now standing on the frontlines to guide other vulnerable regional youth through the healing process.
Dee, who grew up in regional Gippsland, spent her formative years navigating a highly volatile home environment before being removed from her parents’ care due to chronic exposure to severe mental health crises, drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic violence.
At 14, her domestic stability fractured completely following the bitter breakdown of her parents’ relationship.
“My parents started drinking and using marijuana daily,” Dee said.
The situation spiralled further in 2015 when her father died unexpectedly, triggering what Dee described as a severe, prolonged mental health breakdown for her mother.
Feeling isolated, a chance presentation at her local secondary school introduced Dee to Youth Insearch — a national charity dedicated to delivering peer-led mental health and wellbeing programs specifically for young people recovering from extreme adversity.
“Since my first Weekend Workshop in 2012, I finally had a place to be held, seen, and heard, and be around other young people who had been through similar things,” she said.
The core framework of Youth Insearch relies on a combination of qualified mental health clinicians working alongside young people who possess direct, lived experience — a dual approach that Dee said immediately
shattered the barriers she usually felt with clinical interventions.
“What stood out to me the most was young people supporting young people,” she said.
After participating in multiple recovery programs, Dee advanced through the organisation’s leadership training pipeline to become an accredited Peer Leader, mentoring other regional teens facing complex hardships.
In 2024, her journey came full circle when she formally joined the Youth Insearch staff as a professional Peer Worker assigned to the East Gippsland catchment.
“I’m now supporting young people the same way I was once supported,” Dee said.
“I no longer wanted to be the victim of the circumstances and situations that had happened in my life.”
The program, she noted, gave her the emotional toolkits required to manage her own complex trauma while systematically building long-term professional confidence and personal resilience.
Youth Insearch currently deploys its specialised support networks across the entirety of Gippsland, servicing the East Gippsland, Wellington, Latrobe City, South Gippsland, and Baw Baw shires.
The organisation is utilising Dee’s success story to drive an urgent call for increased state and federal government investment in regional peer-support programs, pointing to a stark disparity in mental health outcomes between country and metropolitan areas.
The necessity of the service is backed by alarming localised data from the Gippsland Primary Health Network, which indicates that up to 17 per cent of children and adolescents in the region experience a diagnosable mental disorder each year. Furthermore, suicide and self-inflicted injury remain the leading causes of the overall disease burden among regional Victorians aged 15 to 44.
Now securely embedded in her community role, Dee remains fiercely determined to ensure East Gippsland’s most vulnerable teenagers don’t fall through the structural cracks.
“I hope to stay in this role for as long as funding allows and continue making a genuine difference in young people’s lives,” she said.
