Hopeful Voyager

Kanthi Perera

Navigating your way through the ambiguous losses of mental health

Hopeful Voyager is the first book to offer practical understanding and help to those facing stressful and ongoing loss through mental ill health. Lacking clarity and defying resolution, this kind of “ambiguous loss” results in complicated grief.

If you or your family are affected by mental ill health, Hopeful Voyager will be a welcome companion on the journey, assisting you to:

Understand the flow-on effects of mental ill health for those directly affected and those who care about them.

Explore the relevance of “ambiguous loss” to your own experience.

Develop strategies to manage the journey through such losses.

 

These findings are based on Dr Kanthi Perera’s doctoral research.

 

“Dr Perera’s groundbreaking work advances the theory of ambiguous loss by explaining previously unidentified stressors for those who experience mental ill health personally and for the families who care for them.  Once people know the source of their stress, they can begin managing it.”
—Professor Pauline Boss, Author of Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss (2006)
 
“This information was like a lightbulb going “yes”….. It made me realise there is hope and that after many years of being in an ambiguous loss situation, I have actively been going in the right direction.” —Workshop participant

 

 

 

About the Authors

Dr Kanthi Perera is a social worker working for the mental health services of WA. In 2005 she was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to study innovative programs that address loss and grief in the context of mental illness in order to minimise the distress and trauma experienced by both the person with the diagnosis and his/her family. She visited several centres in Canada and the USA. She was also the recipient of the 2001 Australian Association of Social Workers Award of Excellence in the category of Innovation and Pioneering; the 2004 ARAFMI Service Provider Award; the 2010 Rotary Allied Health Officer of the Year Award, and a 2013 Convocation Research Travel Award from the University of WA. Along with three friends of the late Dr. K.B. McManus she set up the Dr. K.B. McManus Memorial Fund (2006-2014) to assist people with mental ill health to access the arts. She is grandmother to Angus, Amelia and Georgia.

Dr Ann McGuire collaborated in the writing of this book. She spent over thirty years teaching narrative to undergraduate and graduate students at Curtin University. She has been the recipient of an Australian Commonwealth Scholarship and a Curtin University Guild Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has published work on utopian fiction and gothic narrative. Her current interest in the role of storytelling in managing loss underpinned her work with Kanthi in developing this self-help book.