Beyond Borders: Global Mental Health Conference

Learners with albinism and mild intellectual developmental disorder (MIDD) in Soweto township demonstrate resilience as they navigate complex and intersecting challenges within their educational and social environments. Moving beyond visibility, this study foregrounds how these learners respond to barriers associated with visual impairments, visible physical differences, and cognitive and adaptive limitations, highlighting their capacity for strength, adaptability, and persistence. This phenomenological study explored resilience among learners with albinism and MIDD in Soweto township trough the Ubuntu lens. Six participants were purposively selected from a Learners with Special Educational Needs (LSEN) school. Data were generated through individual interviews and the draw-and-narrate technique, allowing participants to express their lived experiences through both verbal and visual forms. Thematic analysis revealed that resilience is enacted through personal agency, adaptive coping strategies, and, importantly, through relational support systems embedded in school and community contexts. Framed within an ubuntu perspective, the findings position resilience as a relational and contextually grounded process rather than an individual trait. The study highlights the role of inclusive practices, supportive relationships, and contextually responsive interventions in strengthening learners’ sense of belonging and capacity to thrive. By aligning with an ubuntu framework, the study emphasises that resilience is co-constructed through interconnectedness, care, and shared humanity, offering important implications for inclusive education in contexts such as Soweto township.

How does the human mind maintain resilience and exercise autonomy when entirely stripped of physical freedom? This presentation explores the extraordinary lived experience of surviving a violent kidnapping, utilizing creative psychological framing to negotiate release, and navigating the long-term, non-linear realities of post-traumatic stress.


Far from a passive narrative of endurance, this session focuses on the innovative cognitive strategies required to build and sustain resilience during and after an acute life crisis. In speaking I will deconstruct how to discover "creative agency" within a powerless environment, leveraging adaptive communication, tactical empathy, and psychological framing as active tools to de-escalate captors and secure freedom.


Moving beyond the incident itself, the presentation examines the lifelong journey of trauma recovery. In speaking, I will share how conventional clinical interventions were augmented by practice-based, creative resilience strategies—such as narrative reclamation and somatic grounding—to manage severe PTSD and transition from a state of perpetual hypervigilance to one of genuine thriving. By blending profound personal narrative with psychological insight, this session offers mental health practitioners, researchers, and advocates a rare, first-hand perspective on the mechanics of survival, the reality of living with trauma across the lifespan, and actionable frameworks for fostering post-traumatic growth.

Psychosis spectrum experiences (PSE), including hearing voices, are too often understood only through a deficit-based, symptom-focused lens — one that centers medication, underemphasizes relational approaches, and leaves little room for the perspectives of people who live with these experiences. This session presents a co-developed, peer-and-clinician framework for serving voice-hearers, their families, and the professionals who support them, grounded in a strengths-based reframing of psychosis as part of the natural diversity of human experience.
Drawing on the presenters' collaborative active-learning toolkit, Reframing Psychosis Spectrum Experiences, the session introduces relational strategies as well as practical tools for approaching voice content, including command voices.  
Key insights include: relationships with voices are dynamic and can shift through boundary-setting and other concrete strategies, not just suppression; most commanding voices are non-violent, and the relationship between command content and behavior is shaped by belief, relationship, and perceived consequence rather than the command itself; and integrating peer expertise alongside clinical training produces more compassionate, more accurate, and more resilient systems of support.
This session models the conference's commitment to lived experience as expertise by centering a peer specialist as co-author and co-presenter throughout, offering attendees a practical, replicable template for collaborative knowledge-building between communities and systems of care — and concrete tools they can use immediately in clinical, peer, or family-support settings.