Our Story in Brief

The Bouverie Centre was established as a clinical mental health setting for children and adolescents and their families in the 1950’s (The Bouverie Clinic) and from the late 60’s pioneered the development of family therapy training and practice in Victoria. In the early 80’s the focus moved to include adult clinical populations and by the late 80’s our training programs became the first academic family therapy courses in Australia.

 

Since this period a major focus of our work has been to support all Victorian mental health services (via training, supervision and consultation) to include families as part of their total approach to service provision; Family Sensitive Practice (FaST). This endeavor has led to a growing connection with carers and consumers of mental health services in a number of projects. More recently we have developed specific training for professionals within agencies e.g.: Single Session Work in the Community Health sector or Clinical Supervision in the AOD (The Community Services Team). All our programs are integrated through our Research and Evaluation unit and through our staff who most commonly work across a number of program areas. Our academic courses now range from Graduate Certificate to Master level and we have a number of students involved in higher degree research projects (PhD).