Liberation has a Core Team of people who take a lead with Liberation’s work. The team consists of:

Dorothy Gould

Dorothy is Liberation’s Founder and the group’s Coordinator. She is a freelance consultant, trainer and researcher with lived experience both of mental distress and trauma and of the psychiatric system. Dorothy has a passionate commitment to human rights and so campaigns strongly for people who experience mental distress/trauma to have access to the full human rights set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including all those of us who experience more than one form of discrimination. For Dorothy, that means fundamental change at all levels of society, in its structures and provisions, in the media and among local communities and their members.

Julie Jaye Charles

Julie Jaye CBE is the NHS Board Advisor & Lead on Advocacy & Co Production at North East London NHS Foundation Trust. For 12 years before this, she was a Patient & Carer Involvement Advisor, Chair Person of Patient Experience and Trustee lead on equalities, diversity and inclusion. Julie Jaye is the Founding Executive Director of Start Change CIC Limited, an organisation seeking to empower disabled people of colour to drive changes that are meaningful to them and their communities. From 1997 to 2019, she worked as the Founder and Chief Executive of the Equalities National Council (ENC) of Disabled People and Carers from Black and Minority Ethnic Communities. Julie Jaye is passionate about the wealth of talent and potential in these communities and strongly believes that ‘there will come a time when Disabled people from ALL communities are recognised and accepted as equal members of society - the question is when’.

Clenton Farquharson (Details to follow.)

Mary Nettle

I am 70 and been labelled with manic depression, now Bi Polar, after a breakdown at work in 1978. I was treated in asylums which were huge old Victorian institutions with no therapy except control by medication. It was through what is now called peer support that I came out of my lost decades and found my voice. I believe in working in partnership to effect change. I am self employed as a mental health user consultant and live in Worcester.

Cheryl Prax

I am a member of ‘Speak Out Against Psychiatry’ (SOAP), ‘Network Against Psychiatric Assault’ (NAPA) and ‘Mind Freedom International’ (MFI). SOAP is based in the UK but the last two are based in the US. I count myself as a psychiatric survivor because, even though my brush with psychiatry was very short, it was traumatic and changed my life forever.