Ange Weinrabe

For the past twenty years, Angé Weinrabe has worked with young adults who were labelled as disenfranchised and “difficult” by the mainstream systems. Angé found most of these youth to be extremely bright young creatives. Her work has been to provide informed decision-support to these youth and engage with various institutions and public and private sectors to reconnect these young people with like-minded others.

Over the years of working with individuals, Angé found that the young person’s inner voice had either been silenced over time or remained unexpressed, leading them to feel frustrated and anxious at critical time points in their lives. Taking this key aspect into account, Angé developed the GEM Method, or academically termed her – Cultural Interaction Model, that ensures that young adults – who are seeking support – gain it at the right time and feel safe enough to start re-connecting with their local community to be able to add to their cultural repertoire.

As an outcome of the GEM Model, skills and decision-support services have been provided to young people, enabling a vast number of individuals to flourish in their lives (relationships, employment, and study). In Angé’s experience, creative young people are at times misunderstood – by their parents, their teachers, and also by the society around them. Young people, especially creative young adults today, are more stressed than ever, mainly because they require simple support mechanisms to guide them in their overall decision-making.

This “æffective” meaningful approach fuels Angé’s dedication to assisting young people at a vulnerable stage in their lives. Holding an Arts (Adv.) Hons. Degree in Philosophy, The University of Sydney, and a Masters in Philosophy from the Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney Medical School, in 2020 Angé researched and published a hypothesis that dysregulated emotion (mainly anxiety) impairs decision-making in youth. In 2021, Angé with co-author Prof. Ian B. Hickie published a Review on the Impact of Emotional Dysregulation on Adolescent Decision-Making.  Her forthcoming book, The Influence of Culture on Addiction  “Changing Scripts”, by Palgrave Macmillan NY, Springer Nature, is a cross-disciplinary approach that provides novel insights into the two explanatory models of addiction (and psychiatry) not discussed elsewhere, from a theoretical and practical perspective, making it relevant to the fields of forensic, cultural, and youth psychiatry. 

Angé is currently completing her PhD, still at the University of Sydney, where she aims to explore the critical role of culture when investigating the two main explanatory models of addiction – the Medical and Social Models. Translating and applying her academic research, as well as applying the empirical outcomes of GEM’s programs (GEM Method), and tools (music). She seeks to bring into conversation philosophical traditions that aim to clarify processes of cultural meaning-making with present-day approaches to cross-cultural psychiatry and public health. For this methodology’s practical application – working with youth globally, visit our Australian registered Charity’s website. Here tools like our Music developed by our sister organisation, transforms the theory into practice.

Angé’s long term aim is to align GEM with WHO 2030 goals in order to target Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD’s) and its projected thirty-year effect on the health sector and global economy, and with the WHO 2004 (Affective Interventions and Policies) goals, in their call to find innovative ways to address the Prevention of Mental Ill-Health. Her forthcoming and current publications can be accessed online. Importantly, through GEM, Angé’s vision is to eventually bring free, effective, and accessible decision-support products and services to young people globally, putting them in charge of their lives.