Hannah Komatsu has worked within marginalised communities for the past 21 years.  While Hannah has an education in social work, her passion has always traced back to her beginnings in peer education work at age 21.  After working alongside sex workers, street communities, youth justice, and families, she now finds herself working in a Peer Facilitation role in a peer mental health service based in Christchurch.  She has a lived experience of significant mental distress and is grateful, for the richness that it has brought to her life.

This gratefulness, has been hard fought and has developed into a passion for supporting people to make sense of their experiences of distress in a way that does not limit their futures.  She has been working most recently on projects in the space of Mad and Neurodivergent Pride.  This has included most recently Divergence: A Festival of Madness, during which 16 events were held with the theme for 2019 being Mad Wisdom.  The wisdom that is gained through mad experiences has become a source of interest and investigation for Hannah.

She believes that the first responses to people’s experiences of mental distress is fundamental to how a person develops into the future.  She is keen to see that interventions in this space take into account what people who have had these experiences deem to have been most useful, not just what professionals have decided should be practiced.  As a young person (15 years of age) she experienced being admitted to a psychiatric hospital alongside adults, and as an adult she now hopes to be able advocate for young people to receive effective and appropriate support, and to show with her life that significant experiences of mental distress do not have to limit the possibilities for the path into adulthood.