Author: Angela

Angela J Williams, PhD, is a writer, illustrator and story teller from Wollongong, Australia. A writer, thinker and yeller, Angela Williams is mildly notorious for seeing problems and pointing them out. She’s tussled with Fred Nile in the Sydney Morning Herald, taken academia to task in the Guardian’s Anonymous Academic, gone to Crikey about the treatment of mentally ill women in prison, and most recently blown the whistle on dangerous risks in her (former) charity workplace. Angela does one thing really well – find problems and yell about them.

Happy mental health month

Apparently it’s ‘mental health month’. Today I helped a friend in crisis get to a hospital. To do that, we needed to call a central 1800 mental health line because we don’t have community mental health teams anymore. My friend in crisis had to agree to having the call recorded to get triaged for admission. […]

Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s trauma

Been thinking a lot lately about intergenerational trauma and how we carry the pain of our parents in our flesh. I will never know the full potentials I was born with because of the changes complex trauma made in my brain, body and heart. Writing Snakes and Ladders peeled the scabs off so many traumas […]

“Everyone has imposter syndrome”

Academic peeps. When you say “we all have imposter syndrome” to people from marginalised backgrounds, you erase the many layers of disadvantage they’ve fought against to get into those ivory halls. I straight out stopped talking about my dis-ease in academia because so many of you responded like this. I left because of these words. […]

Don’t ask if I’m OK

I have decided we need to rename ‘RUOK’ day to ‘Am I OK’ day. Don’t ask me if I’m okay, because I can’t always answer honestly. Instead, ask yourself what it is in you that might make me feel I can’t trust you with my truth. People living with suicidal ideation don’t need to spend […]

Stop using suicide risks as emotional blackmail in the Covid conversation

Last night I happened to scroll past an attack on Fiona Patten MP on Facebook. Hundreds seemed to be yelling at her at once about how many more people are dying from suicide than Covid. Because I live with this risk, I read a bit. It seemed to be a large white mob, all very […]

Stop shushing victims

I don’t think most people understand how much trust it destroys when you tell survivors of nasty shit that we need to speak nicely to be heard. Speaking nicely didn’t stop the bad shit happening to us and it won’t stop bad things happening to other people. Our anger is justified. Our grief is justified. […]

And the case is closed so now I can write

On Tuesday the cops visited to tell me they couldn’t take action on the sexual assault because I didn’t report it until after he called the cops on me on October 30th last year (and because my trauma made me panic laugh after the assault). After telling me this, they finally wrote down the Crimestoppers […]

We aren’t obliged to respect police

Pretty much at the end of my ‘we can open their minds through debate’ tether so here’s my final statement on this (specific) topic. Blaming police brutality on a lack of respect is like asking a schoolkid what they were wearing when their teacher raped them. Disrespect is not an excuse for assault. But for […]