Email admin@supportgroups.org.au for any enquiries.

About Support Groups Queensland:

As advocates for health and wellbeing, our grassroots experience and practical frameworks help build the presence and potency of support groups.

Connect with people from all walks of life who understand the nuance of your lived experience. Find an existing group or establish, shape, promote and nourish a new support group based on a united vision.

Community-driven, we offer free services to help individuals, families, and carers seek and sustain support groups. From genetic conditions, chronic disease and mental health challenges to addiction, grief and loss, parenting, trauma and abuse – connect to a collective.

Meet Kelleigh Ryan:

Kelleigh Ryan is a descendant of the Kabi Kabi people of South-East Queensland and the Australian South Sea Islanders on her mother’s side. She has been a member of the Australian Psychological Society since 2009. She is a registered psychologist with Australian Health Practitioner Registration Agency (AHPRA), a small private practice, and a consulting company called The Seedling Group. Kelleigh has a strong history of working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous clients and communities who have experienced trauma. She has shared her knowledge and expertise to support the APS on several Expert Reference Groups and working parties over the past decade to build a better therapeutic practice in Australia. Her interests and expertise lie in healing from trauma, culturally safe trauma-informed practices and social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB). Within the field of psychology, she has worked across many areas of practice, from Employee Assistance Programs (EAP), child and adolescent mental health, family wellbeing, critical incident response, child sexual abuse, Stolen Generations survivors and cultural safety in clinical supervision.

Kelleigh holds a seat on the Australian Indigenous Psychologist Association Board (AIPA) and is one of the founding members of the newly formed First Peoples of the World Psychology Network. In 2019 Kelleigh was honoured with the Indigenous Allied Health Australia’s prestigious “Lifetime Achievement Award” and was the first Aboriginal Psychologist to be appointed as a clinical assessor on the Psychologist Panel of Assessors for the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT). In 2021 Kelleigh was nominated for grade of Australian Psychological Society Fellow, which is a high level of recognition within the APS, as a result of her significant contributions to the APS and the field of psychology.

Kelleigh prioritises working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, organisations, and people who wish to support better outcomes for her countrymen. Her focus is to influence the understanding of cultural safety in trauma-informed practice within practice, policy and governance across all sectors. Her work in the private sector, universities, colleges, and research projects has been to influence the practice of cultural safety and raise cultural equity through co-design and Indigenous Standpoint theory. Kelleigh’s practice focus has always been on healing trauma wounds and preventing re-traumatisation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. As the pandemic has impacted individuals’ ability to attend training and support, Kelleigh has taken her training online with coaching provided by fellow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander professionals to support ongoing access to culturally safe clinical knowledge. Kelleigh’s psychological treatment and education training uses the Aboriginal eight ways of learning to provide a more effective healing experience.