Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health

Martin Ingle is a writer, filmmaker and obsessive-compulsive worrywart who lives and works on Yuggera land. His work spans all things documentary, fiction, theatre and mental health. His comedy-drama series Disorderly was developed with Screen Queensland in 2018 and among other gongs was an international finalist for the prestigious ScreenCraft Fellowship. Suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder to varying degrees of severity for many years, he is a fierce mental health advocate, featuring in the OCD episode of the ABC’s You Can’t Ask That in 2021, and playing the lead role (opposite a plush toy dinosaur) in the Screen Australia–developed series about OCD, Plushed. He's one of five authors of Try Not To Think Of A Pink Elephant (Fremantle Press 2022), and is one of many contributors to mental health anthology Admissions (Upswell Publishing 2022). His other writing has been published in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, ABC News Online, The Chaser and The Shovel.

David Stavanger is a poet, producer, parent, and former psychologist living on Wodi Wodi Dharawal land. He also spends most of his week as an Artistic Director at Red Room Poetry. David is the author of The Special (UQP), awarded the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize; and Case Notes (UWAP), which won the 2021 Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry. He is the co-editor of SOLID AIR: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word (UQP, 2019) and Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health (2022). David's new collection is The Drop Off (Upswell Publishing, 2025), which explores the liminal space of shared custody and societal tropes of the ‘broken family’.

Pascalle Burton is a Meanjin-based experimental poet and performer with an interest in conceptual art and cultural theory. She also plays in the band The Stress of Leisure. Her collection About the Author is Dead is available through Cordite Books. 

Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her second book, The Exclusion Zone (UQP 2023), is out now. 

Wendy Burton is living independently in the place of her dreams.