About Justin McDermott

Justin McDermott is a writer, artist, speaker, and lived-experience mental health advocate and peer worker based in Victoria, Australia.

His work explores psychosis, survival, spirituality, creativity, and the search for meaning within extreme states of mind. Drawing from his own experiences of voices, visions, hospitalisation, recovery, and peer work, Justin writes from inside the storm rather than about it from a distance.

Through Dream State, he brings together memoir, poetry, visual art, philosophy, and future music projects into one evolving creative world. His work asks what it means to break and continue, to listen without being consumed, to rebuild after collapse, and to transform suffering into something that can speak.

At the heart of his writing is a belief that the inner world should not be hidden, dismissed, or romanticised, but met with honesty, imagination, humility, and care.

His Field Notes section gathers shorter essays and reflections on silence, voice-hearing, spirituality, loneliness, creativity, recovery, and the search for meaning - including pieces such as Between Silence and Song and The Chamber and the Choir.

His first book, Dream State: The Storm Within, is the foundation of this creative world - a memoir of meaning, survival, and ordinary weather.