Finding the right pathway

A childhood fantasy of becoming a pilot was quickly overturned by a conversation with an old lecturer setting Richard Oades on a path of sociology where he discovered a passion for helping people along the way.

Now years on, the academic, chief executive officer, father and husband has settled in the South West where he has bold plans to change the face of the mental health industry.

Born in the United Kingdom, Richard began his career as a teacher and computer operator before moving to Australia where he spent 13 years in the Kimberley working with remote Aboriginal communities.

A master of many roles he said his greatest achievement was the completion of a PhD of Philosophy in Social Sustainability.

“I’ve generally been guided by working with the disadvantaged who are affected by poverty, generally I look at my roles in relation to the impact I can have,” Richard said.

“My PhD, which took me 10 years, is a reflection of what I think is important and honours what I’ve achieved in my lifetime, it’s about what I see as a big problem in society – a lack of engagement and skills in people.

“I’ve picked up a lot of knowledge and so it’s about imparting that knowledge and getting people to work in a more sustainable way.”

Richard moved to the South West, working with the South West Development Commission on the development of Supertowns and managed projects in Margaret River, Collie and Manjimup.

He is now the chief executive officer of not-for-profit mental health service Pathways SouthWest.

“It’s not sexy to talk about prevention work – funnily enough it’s not acknowledged that without people we’ve got nothing,” he said.

“I’ve come to work in Mental Health because it’s one of the hardest areas to work in and the biggest – we need to work in such a way to empower people to run their own lives rather than just receiving services.

“Mental health is a real problem, it’s huge and it’s frightening for politicians because it will cost a lot of money to address, it’s very complex.”

Richard lives on a 6.8ha property in Donnybrook where he finds satisfaction in seeing through practical tasks and an occasional game of golf.

“After working with people all week, which is very frustrating, completing a fence and actually seeing what I’ve done, it’s the practical side of things that I yearn for,” he said.

“I’ve often thought I’d like to do something else, I used to want to be a park ranger – that would be nice, working with nature and being very practical.

“I’d like to see the community have more faith in themselves. We tend to build up reliance to services, we can’t buy more services there’s not money to do that but people existed long before services and they existed quite well.”