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Kelly Marson

Kelly Marson

Community Activation Lead at Let's Talk, a mental health charity based in south-west Victoria, Australia, focused on breaking stigma in regional communities.

Sep 28, 2026

1:07
For listeners who haven't heard about the organisation before, could you give a little explanation of what the organisation is?
1:16
Definitely.
1:18
So Let's Talk, like you said, began in 2016 after there was a cluster of suicides in our local area, not only around Warrnambool, but also locally sort of outside in our rural small towns.
1:33
And when we say a cluster, we're talking about obviously a few or more in a small timeframe period of people who take their lives.
1:43
And I guess out of that, the parents of one of the young men who took their life, Jane and Mick Fitzgibbon, got together with a local mental health clinician in town, John Parkinson, and they decided to open up a community space for people to come in and have a conversation around obviously the experiences and the trauma that everyone was experiencing at that time.
2:08
And out of that came a realisation that there was still very much a stigma attached, you know, to the mental health conversation.
2:16
And especially in our rural isolated areas where the conversation just doesn't really come up very much.

13 MINS LATER

15:46
So yeah, can you tell I feel passionately about this?

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