Speakers

ZeZe is a lived experience practitioner and is autistic with lived experience of psychosis and personality disorder. She uses her lived experience of being sectioned for 4 years as a teen, in psychiatric intensive care and secure units, to impact meaningful change in the world around her, across the UK and beyond.

She is an experienced mental health speaker and has spoken at the Institute for Mental Health, the Royal College of Psychiatry and NHS Confederation Mental Health Network. She is also a part time lecturer at 2 universities for Children and Adolescent Mental Health Nursing and Social work. She has spoken at a TEDx event in 2021 about suicide prevention and mental health struggles she has encountered. In 2022, ZeZe represented UK at a global youth mental health conference where she was chosen to present flowers to royalty and create a peer support programme for internationally-travelling young people.

ZeZe has worked on a nationally radical youth mental health campaign called Fight for All the Feels, helping to raise £1.2million towards hiring peer support workers for a youth mental health services to combat the detrimental effects of the pandemic on young people’s mental illness and surging demand for referral to statutory mental health services. On an international public-facing anti-stigma campaign for Personality Disorders, ZeZe has contributed her lived experience and discussed impacting change to senior policy makers. She has also spoken with policy makers and clinicians to ensure that the local psychiatric unit is renovated, consequently generating £4.8 million. Some of the organizations she has worked with include the National Autistic Society, the Centre for Mental Health and the Speakers Collective.

Her goals are to continue setting up a charity for emotionally dysregulated autistic children and young people, which already received Commonwealth games funding. She wishes to dedicate her life to the cause of severe and enduring mental illness.

Her hobbies include weight training, walking, and binge-watching Netflix.