About Us

Welcome and thank you for wanting to find out about the Hunter Institute of Mental Health. 

The Institute is a unique organisation in Australia. It is an organisational unit of the publicly funded mental health service in the Hunter and New England Local Health District (based in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia).  

We are a fully self-funded organisation. All activities and staff of the Institute are paid for by fees for services, grants, funding agreements, donations and sponsorships. 

Our activities are devoted to promoting mental health and wellbeing in Australia and to improving outcomes for people who experience mental illness, and those who are affected by the mental illness of someone they know, love, live with or care for. 

We are committed to creating a society in which all people are supported to have the best possible mental health and wellbeing.   


We build capacity for mental health promotion and prevention

We apply our knowledge and skills to increase the knowledge and skills of individuals, organisations and communities to create the conditions for improved mental health.   


We work in partnership

The Institute follows the dictum of the World Health Organisation that "mental health is everybody’s business". Efforts to promote mental health and prevent mental illness require all sectors of society to work together. Therefore we do not work alone but always in partnership with others.   


We are evidence-based

All of the work that we do is evidence-based. We rely on the knowledge generated by well conducted research, the understandings derived from well-founded theoretical models, and the experience of experts, including the experience of our target groups. 

We contribute to the evidence base by using multiple strategies to disseminate the knowledge we learn from doing our work rigorously and through evaluation.


Acknowledgement

The Hunter Institute of Mental Health acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the traditional owners of the land, and that we live and work on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.