Just Listening: A Revolutionary Response to Distress and Connection
| Wednesday, June 4, 2025 |
| 3:10 PM - 3:40 PM |
Overview
Matt Ball, Founder and Director of the Humane Clinic, a Nurse Practitioner and Psychotherapist
Presenter
Matt Ball
Nurse Practitioner & Psychotherapist & Founder and Director of Humane Clinic
Humane Clinic
Just Listening: A Revolutionary Response to Distress and Connection
Abstract
RD Laing made the point that "the ‘treatment that we give someone is the way we treat that person". But what does that mean in the modern world of mental health?
'Mental Health' is now a major industry. At its origin, what we now call mental health was once a dilemma that would affect a small minority of people in our communities. In modern times, we have elevated the concept of mental health to a status that requires industry of its own. This has led to an economic avalanche in providing ‘diagnosis’, ‘intervention’ and a global movement to address the apparent ill health of up to 50% of society!
Despite the emergence of this global juggernaut and professionalisation of responding to human (dis)connection, we might consider what has been lost in how we respond to one another in community, when a person is expresses distress.
An overview of a the Just Listening Community describe a practical enactment of responding to human distress, not as a symptom of biogenetic disease, but as an opportunity and invitation for community members to treat one another with love and connection as an alternative to the industry complex of mental health.
Just Listening is a revolutionary response to distress and connection. This established practical and philosophical model demonstrates the inherent possibilities of connection, when the treatment of one another in community returns human to human connection as the priority.
'Mental Health' is now a major industry. At its origin, what we now call mental health was once a dilemma that would affect a small minority of people in our communities. In modern times, we have elevated the concept of mental health to a status that requires industry of its own. This has led to an economic avalanche in providing ‘diagnosis’, ‘intervention’ and a global movement to address the apparent ill health of up to 50% of society!
Despite the emergence of this global juggernaut and professionalisation of responding to human (dis)connection, we might consider what has been lost in how we respond to one another in community, when a person is expresses distress.
An overview of a the Just Listening Community describe a practical enactment of responding to human distress, not as a symptom of biogenetic disease, but as an opportunity and invitation for community members to treat one another with love and connection as an alternative to the industry complex of mental health.
Just Listening is a revolutionary response to distress and connection. This established practical and philosophical model demonstrates the inherent possibilities of connection, when the treatment of one another in community returns human to human connection as the priority.
Biography
Matt Is a Nurse Practitioner, Psychotherapist and founder of Humane Clinic, a practice setting that focusses on humane psychotherapeutic approaches to working with people in altered states and psychosis.
Matt developed the Dissociachotic Framework and Suicide Narratives and is Co-founder of the Just Listening Community. Matt consults as a psychotherapist and supervisor nationally and internationally. In 2024, Matt worked in London teaching and embedding the theory and practice in acute NHS mental health crisis settings.
In 2025 the Humane Clinic will begin a training program with collaborators in London to train and hand over the Just Listening model to the UK community.
