Chris Brooks

About me

In my 40 years of nursing I have worked in many different areas within both the general and mental health areas of practice. I have blended this experience with my training and experience in Natural Medicine, with a particular focus on physical health in mental health care and the role of nutrition to help improve both physical and mental health conditions. I am passionate about nutritional psychiatry and believe this is an important addition to therapeutics and the future of mental healthcare.

My experience

I have 40 years experience in healthcare as a nurse, over 30 years as a mental health nurse, 20 years in Natural Medicine and over 10 years providing education and supervision to nurses and hospital allied health staff. I have worked in both inpatient and community settings within Australia, England and Saudi Arabia.
My experience extends to inpatient child and adolescent care, inpatient acute adult care, forensic mental health services, drug and alcohol services, adult mental health rehabilitation and recovery services, case management within public mental health community services, private community mental health services providing psychotherapeutic interventions and nutritional / physical health advice, and private practice delivering nutritional psychiatry treatments.

My current role/work

Current position is a mental health clinician in primary mental health in the Yarra Ranges. In this role I combine my general nursing, mental health nursing and natural medicine knowledge to provide a comprehensive approach to mental health care.

My training

I hold a bachelor in nursing, post-graduate diploma in Naturopathy and Master of Mental Health Nursing by Research. My research focused on establishing a cognitive emotional reframing approach that could be utilized by mental health nursing in acute and community setting to assist people to control and manage their responses to their thoughts by understanding and recognizing the emotional content within the language they use to describe the conclusions by which they live. To further support and enhance my work I have undertaken further specialist training in Nutritional Psychiatry and I am currently studying to become a mental health nurse practitioner.

Recent training is:
Advance nutritional psychiatry – 2020 – 21
Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) – 2022 – 23

My approach to supervision

Put simply I facilitate a safe space in which the supervisee can reflect on their practice through regular exploration of the supervisee’s work with clients, in a systematic way to a depth determined by the supervisee. This process aims to integrate traditional knowledge and relevant theory, self-understanding and skills-development into the supervisee's practice. However, the mental health nurse remains responsible for their own professional improvement through this regular exploratory reflective work, being an active participant in, and taking ownership of, their own professional development.