Advanced Perinatal Mental Health Pre-Conference Workshop

As GP mental health specialists, you're uniquely positioned at the intersection of physical and psychological care during the perinatal period. This intensive workshop equips you with advanced strategies for the complex presentations you see daily.

Fostering Attachment in Primary Care

Master the art of spotting relational patterns in those first precious months, when brief interventions can redirect entire developmental trajectories. Learn evidence-based approaches that work within 15-minute consultations or long psychotherapy appointments, because you're often the only clinician who'll see what's unfolding before it becomes pathology.

The Mental Health of Post-Partum Intimacy

Nobody warned them their body would feel like a stranger's, that desire might vanish entirely, or that physical pain could trigger existential dread. Develop the language and confidence to open conversations about the intersection of sexuality, identity, and psychological wellbeing that patients desperately need but rarely dare initiate—because this silence costs relationships.

When Mental Health Ripples Through the Whole Family

Paternal depression affects 10% of new fathers but receives a fraction of the attention. Siblings regress. Grandparents hover anxiously. Learn to expand your clinical lens beyond the birthing parent and orchestrate whole-family care whilst remaining the steady anchor point, because perinatal mental health doesn't respect individual boundaries, why should your care?

Therapeutic Approaches for Couples Fracturing Under Pressure

Relationship satisfaction plummets by an average of 42% in the first year of parenthood, yet we rarely address the partnership that must survive the transformation. Gain practical, time-efficient interventions for couples in crisis—addressing resentment, loss of intimacy, and competing attachment needs—because a failing relationship amplifies every other mental health vulnerability in the perinatal period.

Shake off the intensity of the day's learning and ease into the weekend ahead. Connect with colleagues old and new over drinks against the Broadbeach backdrop, because the informal conversations that happen with a glass in hand often matter as much as what happens in the conference room.

Fostering Secure Environments for Growth

KEYNOTE - DR JOHANNA LYNCH

Before techniques. Before interventions. Before clever interpretations or evidence-based protocols—there must be soil rich enough to sustain growth. Dr Lynch examines the foundational conditions that make healing possible, drawing on attachment theory and neuroscience to illuminate what we all know but often forget: safety precedes change, connection enables exploration, and our most sophisticated therapeutic tools are worthless in barren ground. For the 78% of mental health patients who see GPs first, this keynote reframes our primary task—not fixing, but cultivating the relational conditions where transformation becomes possible.

Core Skills Through the Discomfort of Practice

Here's what nobody tells you in medical school: the actual work of psychological medicine happens in the pauses, the silences, the moments when you resist the urge to fix or explain or reassure. Through structured role-plays that will make you squirm (in the best way), practise the fundamental skills most of us learned through trial-and-error or not at all—holding distress without drowning in it, asking questions that open rather than close, and sitting with not-knowing when every instinct screams for diagnostic certainty. Expect discomfort. Expect breakthrough. Expect to remember why this work matters.

Actually Engaging Men in Mental Health Care

Three-quarters of suicide deaths. Half the treatment engagement. Andrew Tate has more influence on your teenage male patients than you do. This workshop reframes "toxic masculinity" as traumatised masculinity, explores why angry young men are being radicalised online faster than we can intervene, and teaches practical engagement strategies that actually work, because men don't talk like women, and waiting for them to perform vulnerability the way we expect it is killing them. Learn to recognise distress expressed through action rather than words, build therapeutic alliance side-by-side instead of face-to-face, and intervene before isolation becomes radicalisation.

Connect, reflect, grow, and be nourished in facilitated small groups where the real conversations finally happen. Share the cases keeping you awake, the ethical dilemmas with no clean answers, and the cumulative weight nobody else understands. This isn't networking, it's the collective exhale we all desperately need. Because peer support isn't professional development, it's survival.

KEYNOTE: Protecting Our Tribe

A/Prof Louise Stone

Burnout is what happens when we work too hard. Moral injury is what happens when the system forces us to betray the values that made us become doctors in the first place. Dr Stone names the unnamed epidemic affecting healthcare workers navigating impossible choices, when you know what your patient needs but can't provide it, when administrative requirements trump clinical judgment, when saying no to one patient means saying yes to ten others. This isn't about resilience or self-care, it's about recognising that individual suffering reflects systemic failure, and that healing requires collective action. Essential viewing for anyone wondering why good clinicians are leaving in droves.

Dress up (or don't). Decompress. Dance if the mood strikes. Share meals and stories and the kind of laughter that only happens when clinicians finally stop performing professionalism. This is where friendships solidify, collaborations begin, and we remember that beneath the clinical roles, we're humans doing impossibly human work. Come for the food, stay for the conversations that will still be continuing at breakfast.

Who Gives a Crap About Your Persona?

Dr Shannon Morton

You've perfected the performance, calm, competent, endlessly empathetic. The patients love it. The practice manager relies on it. And it's slowly suffocating the actual person underneath. This experiential workshop tears apart the professional persona many of us didn't realise we were constructing, examining what happens when the mask we wear to survive clinical practice starts costing us our authenticity, our relationships, and our mental health. Part provocation, part permission slip, prepare to get uncomfortable with how much of "you" has been sacrificed to "Dr You," and explore what reclamation might actually look like. Because performing wellness whilst dying inside isn't sustainability, it's slow-motion self-destruction.

Foundations for Safe Trauma-Informed Practice

Dr Ashlea Broomfield

"Where do you feel that in your body?" You've asked the question. They've looked at you blankly. Because trauma doesn't live in narratives and timelines, it lives in constricted breath, chronic tension, and the dissociation that kept them alive but now keeps them stuck. This workshop moves beyond talking about somatic approaches to actually experiencing them, guiding you through embodied awareness practices that form the foundation of trauma-informed care. Learn to recognise when someone is in their window of tolerance versus when they've left their body entirely, and discover interventions that work with physiology rather than just psychology, because you can't think your way out of dysregulation that's locked in the nervous system.

Exploring the Journey into Subspecialities

You love perinatal mental health, or addiction medicine, or gender-affirming care, but how do you actually build a practice around it without going broke or burning out? Hear from clinicians who've successfully carved out niche expertise within general practice, navigating the practical realities of subspecialisation, from fellowship pathways and business models to managing the tension between passion projects and paying the mortgage. Because sustainable careers aren't built on grinding through work you tolerate, they're built on the stuff that makes you excited to show up on Monday morning.

Live Clinical Demonstrations Across Modalities

Tired of staying in your therapeutic comfort zone because learning new modalities feels overwhelming? This isn't death-by-PowerPoint theory, it's live demonstrations of diverse approaches in action. Watch skilled practitioners demonstrate everything from psychodynamic formulation to EMDR, ACT to narrative therapy, with real-time commentary on their clinical decision-making. Ask questions. Notice what resonates. Steal shamelessly. Because the best clinicians aren't dogmatic about modality, they're fluent in multiple languages of healing and choose what each patient actually needs, not what we happen to know best.

Elders of ASPM Share Their Wisdom

Forget the highlight reel, this is where ASPM's most experienced members share what the textbooks don't teach. The career detours that looked like failures but opened unexpected doors. The professional conflicts that taught boundary-setting the hard way. The practices that had to close, the partnerships that fractured, and the moments of profound doubt about whether any of this matters. But also: what still brings joy after decades. How they've sustained meaning when the system actively works against it. Why they'd choose this work all over again. Because sometimes we need reminding that the long game is possible, messy, and absolutely worth it.