Mental health, law and mediation: making sense of loss

Psychology has always been part of dispute resolution, assisting a person to deal with different types of loss experienced when expectations are shattered and may result in or occur in the context of litigation. The law provides us with the context of how to behave, and what behaviour is acceptable and what is not. Thus law and psychology sit at either ends of the continuum with mediation the primary blending agent. This talk will explore how these disciplines play a role in mediation and specifically how differing levels of grief can impact a parties attempts to restructure their lives, utilising a social constructionist approach. The importance of collectively acknowledging the effect of grief utilising the core principles of readiness, willingness and ability to discuss loss and relational aspects will be discussed. The need to use the Normative Information Session (NIS), offering parties a behavioural assignment to reinforce their own relational thinking and engage in responsible actions, within a re-constructionist model of mediation will be presented.

Registration for this event is free but essential. Click here to register.

Katherine Johnson was admitted as a NSW barrister in 1993, and is internationally and nationally accredited as a mediator serving on various panels including the International Mediation Institute (IMI), Papua New Guinea Supreme Court (PNG), World Law Alliance (WLA), World Mediation Organisation (WMO), the Supreme Court of NSW, and the Personal Injury Commission of NSW to name a few. Katherine is also a trainer/assessor of mediators since 2000, a family dispute resolution practitioner (FDRP), and a Guardian Ad Litem with the Department of Justice. She is now a retired counselling, organisational and community psychologist in private practice from 1984 to 2017 and is currently registered as a research psychologist.

Katherine’s extensive practice in Psychology, Law and Education has led to common ground culminating in a PhD in Law majoring in Dispute resolution from Macquarie University in 2015.

Her recently published thesis and handbook for practitioners, called “Mediation Quest: Making Sense of Loss,” develops a new mediation model called the "Re-Constructionist Model" which combines the insights from the field of Loss and grief in Psychology to the practical resolution of disputes in Law. Her interdisciplinary approach develops an organic model of mediation, akin to social constructionism in action that becomes an agent for social change to empower parties. By constructively responding to their own crises/losses in a meaningful way the parties, as grounded researchers, ultimately create their own form of social justice.

Katherine is the Founder of PAVE the Way to PEACE, an interest group meeting in NSW Parliament House since 1996; Co-Founder, of the Dispute Resolution and Psychology Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society (APS); Co-Founder of the Dispute Resolution Industry Forum now called the Council of Alternate Dispute Resolution (CADR); Vice President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law (ANZAPPL) from 2010 to 2017. President of the Australian Dispute Resolution Association (ADRA) for 11 years between the years 2006 to 2023 and Vice President of ADRA for 8 years between the years from 2008 to 2019. Katherine has been called a ‘prac-ademic’ because of her attempts to constructively implement in her practice what is taught in theory but also to learn from practice, what can be generalised from grounded research to become academic knowledge.