Our Troubled Youth – Some Answers

Wendy McCarthy AO is the Chair of headspace – Australia’s National Youth Mental Health Foundation. Over a long career in public life, Wendy McCarthy Wendy McCarthy has held executive and non-executive director roles in many of Australia’s leading private and public institutions. On Tuesday 10 March 2015, Wendy McCarthy joined Matt Noffs, founder of the Street University, Lane Hinchcliffe, Managing Director and Program Co-ordinator of Project 15 and David Cole, Founder of The Balanu Foundation, to speak on her experience of helping Australia’s troubled youth.

OUR TROUBLED YOUTH – SOME ANSWERS

WENDY MCCARTHY AO

I want to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to ancestors past and present.

I started working with adolescents at the age of 20, as a teacher in a secondary school. I thought I was there to teach them about learning. Instead, I discovered that my role as a class teacher where many students had what were called “pastoral problems”, or “pastoral issues” meant I had to have a holistic approach to the development of young adolescents. Very quickly I grew in my understanding about the issues they faced

My life since that time has always been backwards and forwards with women, children, and adolescents. As the director of GoodStart, I look after naught-to-fives, and with Headspace it is 12-25s. There’s a gap in the middle for someone to pick up, and it’s actually quite a serious gap. But right this minute, I’m focused on Headspace which I’ve been chairing for six and a half years.

Headspace is probably the great success story of bi-partisan support and commitment to young people in Australia. There is no other story like it. In the 1970s I ran family planning clinics in NSW, and then I was the director of the national organisation, and we pretty well got bi-partisan support then, but nothing like the story of headspace.

Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne were the ministers who responded to the challenge put forward by psychiatrist Professor Patrick McGorry that early intervention was treated with respect in every medical discipline except mental health. Why was mental health not receiving its share of the health budget when people were presenting at the end of the line with distressed parents, distressed extended families, and high rates of suicide. Why were we not treating these people with respect?

Central to the headspace model was early intervention. If we could get 12 to 25 year-olds to present to us, either with their families, by themselves or through their medical practitioners, and to talk about the things that mattered to them, and they were mostly probably going to be depression and anxiety, then we had a chance of saving those young people from going into critical care. Suitable critical care was almost non-existent.

The other central promise of headspace was one door, and no one turned away.

If you come to us as a parent, say with a 14 year old, you don’t have to start schlepping around for all the services that are required to look after the mental health of this young person. And if you come on your own, you know that you will be safe with us, because you will be triaged through that door, to a place of respect, a quite funky sort of place that looks like a youth centre. But it is a proper health service.

At headspace, you will find behind that door, a social worker, psychiatrist, general practitioner, probably a drug and alcohol counsellor, psychologist who’d be biggest part of our workforce. It’s a multi-disciplinary approach to treat holistically the needs of that young person.

It is truly a privilege to be a part of headspace. And when I think how reluctant I was to take it on. I was at a stage in my life where I was in the mindset of telling myself, “Never do another government board job”. But it was so irresistible to think that it might make a difference to the over half a million young people who suffer some kind of mental health issues in any given year.

When the government changed in 2007 the Labor government agreed to support and expand headspace. The Coalition has returned to government and has continued to support it. Headspace now has 79 centres in operation. It is a big system, and very different from what Lane can manage. His is a beautiful story to tell of individual care.

By the end of 2016 we will have 100 centres. This is a big system response in Australia but it is still about the value and worth of every individual. We also have eheadspace, so people can get online and talk. That was trialled in rural Western Australia where there were high rates of suicides. We wanted to find out if young men would access those services if they were a little bit more at length. And it turned out that they would, and they did. That was the genesis of eheadspace.

We have a schools support program, which works in 350 schools. The idea is to go into a school after a suicide has occurred. It’s a “post-vention” suicide program. In this Headspace staff work with young people, teaching staff, and families when suicide occurs.

I’m going to give you some numbers about our services.

In 2008 we saw 12,000 young people, and we’re up to 150,000 young people with over a million services provided. That’s pretty remarkable. By the end of 2015 our revenue will be $140 million. That is a major commitment. Last year we added an early psychosis intervention program in four centres and plan to roll out another 5 by December 2016,

Of course everyone wants to evaluate headspace. Does it really work?

What young people tell us, and for me that’s the ultimate evaluation, is that they love it, they feel confident, they feel safe, they feel secure. And we see a 56% reduction of psychological distress and 62% say they have a better quality of life when they have had an intervention with headspace.

Our indigenous young people present well above their percentage in the population, which is wonderful because it show they trust us

I could claim we’re the sector leader in engaging young people. 1.3 million visit our website. And I really urge you to go http://www.headspace.org.au/ and see what a fabulous website it is and how easy it is to interact on there.

You’ll see some of the work we’ve done with our Indigenous clients. Our indigenous young people present well above their percentage in the population, which is wonderful because it show they trust us. We’ve hired an agency to work with our Indigenous young people to find the right message for them. The program is called Yarn Safe – it’s on the website – and it’s about how young Aboriginal people like to communicate. The lines to catch their attention in the web vary – “no shame in talking about it”, “talk it up”, “keep talking”. So far, it seems to be having great results.

Another campaign we have is called “I’ve got your back”, which I thought was a shocking set of words, and I was completely wrong despite having a number of grandchildren and knowing many people in that age group. It resonated with young people coming to headspace. Recently, we launched a family and friends small promo, aired in some movie theatres, on free-to-air television and so on.

We have an interesting governance model – with a national board of 11 directors and a national youth advisory group. In every headspace site, we now have a youth advisory group.

It is also an unusual management model: community-based and community led. We hand out contracts to lead agencies around Australia to manage and lead the centres. The strength of the model is the brand. People have to hang in on the brand and all that it stands for in it’s support for young people.

Two years ago, during a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Perth, the Prime Minister’s office rang to ask if I’d like to speak about headspace. I replied, “That would be stupid – they don’t want an older woman speaking about headspace. I’ll send someone from our high energy national youth advisory group.”

The PM’s office hadn’t envisaged at a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting that any young person would have a voice. But we are here to give young people voices – we non-executive directors are the enablers not the frontline. Our young people spoke and, of course, it was the knockout session. When they talked about their lived experience of mental health, of finding someone who took them seriously, who treated them, as one said, with “professional affection and comfort.” They believed that there was always going to be respectful discourse when they went to headspace. That is exactly what I want to hear.

People always ask me which state is ahead in respect to the number of centres. New South Wales has 34, the Territory has 2, Western Australia 10, Queensland 21, South Australia 8 and Victoria 22. Also one in both Israel and Denmark with interest expressed by other Scandinavian countries, Canada and the US.

This is an export program that was not in the business plan. But how interesting that when there is a really great idea being implemented in Australia, the mental health community around the world responds.

Remember that mental health is the fourth most significant non-communicable disease in the world now, and we don’t know really why. But we know that it’s real. And we know that people from other places say to us can we have headspace. Our challenge in exporting our model is to keep the brand fidelity as we share our experience of what we have created in Australia.

My wish from you is that you have a look at our website. Make sure you talk about it to your family and friends so that young people in your family, whom you may not have the faintest idea have an issue with mental health, feel that you’ve accredited it, you’ve talked about it, you’ve said it’s friendly, that it’s really grown up to go to headspace.

When I used to talk about Family Planning, people would never want their parents anywhere near it. They would be hiding, coming in the back door and putting something over their school tunic, or whatever. But headspace is a place where young people like to go. So you can feel pretty safe if you say to anyone in the family, “Has anyone been to headspace?”

I spoke to a group of school principals recently – there was about 60 in the room. I said put up your hand if you’ve never heard of headspace. Not a hand went up. Now that’s not through an advertising budget. It’s about people saying “wow I went to headspace and they were really nice and they really helped me and I’m feeling better.”

I recommend headspace and recommend that you encourage all your government friends to keep on supporting us. The scariest thing of all for me would be that we don’t get time to assess the long-term impact because governments and people have short memories. They ‘think oh this is working, it’s been a successful pilot, and now everyone will do it.’

This needs to be normal, this needs to be everywhere, so that young people can keep their mental health and not lose access to a youth friendly, well designed service, because somebody forgot to put a headspace in their community.