Meet The Team
Our staff are trained by Humane Clinic therapists to offer compassionate and
non-judgmental support to all visitors.
You may use the service anonymously and no experience is too great or too small to share.
Matt Ball
Matt Ball is a Nurse Practitioner and Psychotherapist and is the Founder and Director of Humane Clinic. Matt teaches and speaks internationally on humane approaches to working with a person in distress as an alternative to pathologizing, diagnosis-led mental health systems.
Matt was awarded Australian Mental Health Nurse of the year in 2017 for his work providing alternatives. He was also recently named as a top 10 finalist for the ASTER Guardians | Global Nursing Awards and represented Humane Clinic and Just Listening Community in Dubai in May 2022. His vision for the Just Listening Community draws on lived and professional experiences.
Rory Ritchie
Rory is a Social Worker and Psychotherapist at Humane Clinic. He is co-author of the Suicide Narratives approach with Matt Ball and part of the teaching team at the Clinic. Rory's practice is informed by experiences of seeking assistance while in emotional distress and finding medical model approaches unhelpful.
Rory is passionate about increasing acknowledgement of how environments, systems, and misuses of power fundamentally shape our experiences of ourselves and our world.
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Berny Maywald
Berny is a psychotherapist. She has 19 years experience working in mental health including facilitating hearing voices groups, therapeutic groups, individual client work, and leadership roles supporting and supervising staff, volunteers and students.​
Berny has extensive experience supporting people who experience extreme states, voices, visions and alternative realities.
She has a Dip in Counselling, PG Cert in Family and Systemic Therapy at ACU in Melbourne and in 2020 completed the Psychotherapy certificate at Humane clinic. Berny is part of the teaching team delivering workshops on Just Listening, Hearing Voices and Suicide Narratives. She co-facilitates open dialogue network meetings.​​
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