Kylie Harrison – February 14 2021

Kylie is a poet, performer, public speaker and educator with a passion to bring awareness of mental illness to the community and attempt to combat stigma. She has been involved in making films and digital stories since 2007 and uses her DVD collection, ‘In My Own Words’, as part of her community education presentations for Life Without Barriers at universities, TAFEs and high schools. Kylie has been on radio shows and has had articles in the Messenger newspapers and Adelaide Review. Kylie began writing poetry when she was about eight years old and was thrilled to see her poetry published in the possum pages of the Sunday Mail. She has subsequently had poetry published overseas and a poem published in the Mindfields poetry anthology. As a performer, Kylie has a background of drama and stage plays in high school, played a lead role in a play about mental illness with the Southern Youth Ensemble in 2002, and currently performs stand up comedy with the mental health comedy group, Cracking Up. Kylie has had bipolar disorder for 21 years. She spent time in hospital as a teenager and, as she wanted to be a journalist at the time, is thankful to her hospital school teacher for helping her realise her passion for writing. She is thankful also to a teacher at Hamilton Secondary College adult campus where was attempting to finish year twelve, who encouraged her public speaking skills. She studied creative writing at Flinders University and the Arts TAFE but was unable to graduate due to becoming constantly unwell. She is currently working on an autobiography called Catapult.

Pendulum
Ginninderra Press, 2014; ISBN 9781740278881
Kylie Harrison is a community peer worker, writer and comedian. In Pendulum Kylie writes about her journey and experience with bipolar mood disorder, which she has been exploring in her creative writing for 20 years. She relishes any opportunity to express herself. She loves the variety in her writing and has a vision that her poetry, comedy, speech writing and short film writing will all come together. By revealing her own experiences on her journey to gain insight, she has written a poetry collection that is educational and inspiring, while focusing on trying to combat stigma. Three years on and she is ready to share with the world this eloquent collection. She believes that if you take one line of her story that changes the way you think about mental illness, or remember one of her poems, she has done her job and her experiences have been for a unique purpose.

Short Films (available at https://kylieharrison.wordpress.com/short-films/)
My Brain Still Thinks – with film maker Matt Gray and film editor Lachlan Coles)
Written and produced as part of the Pendulum book launch to visually bring the poetry to life, this film explores themes such as disassociation within psychosis and mental illness and shows different stages of bipolar disorder including therapy and peer work allowing people to walk a little while in Kylie’s shoes.
Brentwood – with mentor/comedian Jo Coventry and filmmaker Lachlan Coles
This film was made as part of Kylie’s comedy show, ‘Psychosis can be a funny thing!’ where she appeared as Miss Communication with her tongue in cheek perspective of life on the other side of the hospital ward, that of the patients and of those living with a severe mental illness in our society. I seek to create change and reduce stigma though laughter.