ABOUT US
We’re Not Here To Fix You. We’re Here To Listen.
A dialogical practice working with individuals, families, and practitioners, via telehealth, across Australia.
Our Story
A Different Kind of Space
For too long, conversations about mental health have been clinical, one-sided, and rushed. People arrive already labelled. Families are briefed rather than included. Practitioners are stretched so thin that real listening feels like a luxury.
We don’t believe it has to be that way.
Dialogue Room was founded to create something different. Spaces that are genuinely open, where every voice has a seat at the table, and where connection is the work, not a nice-to-have alongside the real clinical business.
We work with individuals and families navigating difficult moments, and with practitioners who want more from their practice. We are a small team with deep roots in the international Open Dialogue community, and an unwavering commitment to doing this well.
How It Began
Built From The Inside Out
The mental health system is full of good people doing their best inside a structure that wasn’t built for real human connection. After nearly fifteen years working across that system, in organisations, in teams, in the spaces where the rules bend and the people don’t, our founder came to an unavoidable conclusion. The gaps weren’t going to close from within. Something different needed to exist alongside it.
Dialogue Room was founded to create that something different. Not a clinic. Not a programme. A practice built around the belief that the people in the room already hold the wisdom they need. The practitioner’s role is not to deliver answers. It is to create enough safety, enough stillness, and enough genuine curiosity that those answers can surface.
That conviction became Dialogue Room. Shubhangi founded the practice after nearly fifteen years in the system and four years spent trying to embed Open Dialogue inside Australian organisations. Mark joined not long after as Associate Director. The two had worked alongside each other for years and share a view of what this work asks of people, so the collaboration made sense from the start.
Our People
Dialogue Room is small by design. Every conversation involves people who are genuinely invested in being there.
FOUNDER | REGISTERED PSYCHOLOGIST | DIALOGICAL PRACTITIONER
Shubhangi Kaushik
Shubhangi has spent fifteen years working across the mental health system, across organisations, teams, and the kind of in-between spaces where the real work happens. She has seen what the system does well, and she has seen, more often than she’d like, what it doesn’t.
Open Dialogue found her almost seven years ago. It changed how she understood the work, the relationships, and the whole question of what it means to support someone. Prior to founding Dialogue Room, she spent four years deeply involved in helping organisations embed the approach, translating principles into real practice, and learning the hard way how slowly institutions move. Dialogue Room grew from that experience.
Her approach is simple in principle and harder in practice: show up as a human being, listen with genuine curiosity, and trust that when people feel safe enough to speak, something shifts. She strongly believes in creating spaces where people feel less alone. Not as problems to be fixed or clients to be managed, but as humans finding their way.
Shubhangi is a Kiwi living in Sydney. Away from the work, she is a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and aunt. Relationships that keep her grounded in what matters the most – connection and care.
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR | SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGIST | OPEN DIALOGUE TRAINER & DIALOGICAL PRACTITIONER
Mark Hopfenbeck
Mark has spent over twenty years at the intersection of acute mental health care and the global Open Dialogue movement. He directs the Postgraduate Certificate in Peer-Supported Open Dialogue at City St George’s, University of London, where he is also an Honorary Associate Professor, and he sits on the advisory board of HOPEnDialogue, the international network connecting the global Open Dialogue community. He was a Co-Investigator on the ODDESSI trial, the largest study ever conducted evaluating Open Dialogue.
But his practice is defined less by those titles than by a simple, radical belief: mental healthcare should be the art of making lifelong relationships. A Social Anthropologist and Mindfulness trainer, his view is that the system has become too transactional, treating people as symptoms to be reduced rather than humans to be understood. When someone asks for help with something as private as a crisis, he believes the response needs to be prepared to go the distance. Not as a working relationship, but as a human one.
Mark grew up in the United States, lived in Norway for thirty years, and spent a decade in England before moving to Melbourne three years ago. He is a husband, father, and grandfather who is happiest hiking, snorkelling, or simply being with his family.
Explore Our Other Work
Explore the wider ecosystem of our work, including our podcast and free global community gathering.
