- Mental illness is one of the biggest problems
of our time.
It impacts on productivity, educational outcomes,
physical health, and for many people, it can lead to death.
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- Around one in five Australian adults
experience a mental health condition
in any given year.
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This can really impact on their self-esteem,
their social relationships, and just general well-being.
- Most people have some level of empathy,
or (murmurs) with people who have anxiety and depression
because we all get anxious or depressed.
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But, people who have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia,
it's harder for the community to understand that.
- It's really, really hard
to actually estimate the total costs
mental illness has to the society
because they're huge, they're immense,
no one could possibly ever really calculate the true costs.
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So, if we can really tackle mental illness,
then we could have immense cost savings,
and I think this will increase our productivity
and growth of our nation.
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- The number of people who killed themselves
in the last year
exceeded all the number of deaths
associated with road accidents, drug overdoses, and HIV.
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We also know that suicide is now the biggest killer
of young people between 15 to 25, and 25 to 44.
- Concerningly, around one in seven Australian children
also experience a mental health condition,
and this can range from things
from difficulties with attachment,
or anxiety and depression.
- Everybody has either experienced a mental illness,
or know someone with a mental illness.
It's as common as the flu.
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That experience means that it's easier,
not easy, but easier, to talk about it.
- There has been a greater ability
to talk about mental illness in the community.
It's no longer nearly as stigmatized,
and I think that really normalizes and enables people
to realize that this is a problem
that a very significant proportion
of Australians experience.
But, we don't want to engage in disease mongering.
So, it's very important to put it into perspective.
Reports that are coming through,
and have been coming through for many, many years,
have provided a sufficient trigger
for both the commonwealth government,
and the state government,
and state and government territories around Australia
to pay much closer attention to the problem.
About 4.8 million Australians
have some form of mental illness,
and the majority of that are high-prevalence disorders
like anxiety and depression.
Three percent have what's described
as severe mental illness, something like 750,000 people.
And, they include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder,
and severe depression.
- When the past 10 years, we've talking about mental health,
but in this conversations,
we've not really differentiate mental health,
mental well-being, and mental illness.
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What this means
is that where we are talking about poor mental health,
people often associate that
with mental disorders and mental illness,
which is a category on its own
that needs specific sort of treatments,
and therefore the discussion around mental health
and mental well-being is also stigmatized,
which in itself is a problem.
- Teachers have a great opportunity
to be able to identify kids who have mental-health issues.
Unfortunately, they don't have a lot of time, many of them,
or the resources,
and so they need a lot more support
in also helping those kids.
But, the bottom line
is that it's everybody's business, including teachers,
to be able to support young people's mental health.
- Early intervention is really crucial,
and if we're not picking up
on these mental health conditions,
or other prevalent disorders
that we see in childhood such as ADHD,
then it can have a really detrimental and cascading impact
on the child's development,
and their ability to form and maintain social relationships.
- The Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health
was officially opened this year in July.
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And it represents a body of researchers and clinicians
whose mission is to really build communities
that are developing healthy mental health.
The overriding goal of The Turner
is to work with our communities around us.
So, it was to work in the South East corridor
where there was a massive area of unmet need,
and it's to develop interventions
that will be able to have an impact
on the communities around us,
whether it's remote communities,
or whether it's gone all the way through
to people in Clayton that really need resources
that will promote early and good mental health.
- We're developing training interventions
that are supporting and strengthening cognitive skills
in early childhood.
So, we know that cognitive skills are really important
for supporting both emotional and behavioral regulation,
as well as supporting learning and social relationships.
Digital technology has a lot of potential
to create engaging tools that can be tailored to children.
So we've created an attention-training program
which is called Tali Train,
and it involves a series of exercises
that are tapping core aspects of attention.
And, children repeat these over a period of time,
so we're really strengthening
and building those connections within the brain.
- Over the next year,
we'll be rolling out a new program
with our partners from Harvard
to look at how students can monitor
their well-being and their mental health
using a digital phone,
and see if we can use these technologies
to improve mental health, well-being
across different types of populations.
- There's many potential negative impacts of technology
if it's used poorly.
If it's used well,
it can be a really good servant in your life,
but for many it's becoming a bit of a tyrannical master.
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The over-reliance on social media
is associated with poor mental health,
and higher narcissism.
Like any addiction, it starts to replace other things.
So, pretty soon people aren't actually meeting,
and connecting with others.
They're connecting via a very small screen.
So, there's a kind of disconnect,
there's a kind of social isolation that comes with that.
- We've got psychological interventions,
we've got social interventions,
we've got treatments that can treat symptoms,
and make people feel a bit better.
All of these treatments are partial treatments.
None of them actually fix the problem,
and we don't know what the underlying pathology is
that's in the brain that causes these illnesses.
The brain is very inaccessible,
and so you can't subject people with mental illness
to the same types of tests and scrutiny
that you can to cancer.
- A large number of pharmaceutical companies
have essentially stopped their research
in the field of psychiatric disorders.
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They don't see it as particularly commercially viable
when compared to treatments for cancer
or infectious diseases, for example.
Part of the problem with the stigma
around mental health disorders
is it goes to the very fact
that we can essentially have our personalities affected.
So, it's of paramount important to us
that we change the paradigm
in the way that we think about developing new therapeutics
in the schizophrenia space, addiction space,
other psychiatric disorders.
- It's not just having that quick medication,
that quick pill,
that you think will then just make you really happy.
It takes effort,
and it takes you going out of your comfort zone
to actually build the blocks that you need in your life
that will help you sustain good mental health.
- So, mindfulness is a pretty simple thing
of just being present in your day-to-day life.
It really involves two things, attention and attitude.
Mindfulness, for example, could be one very simple thing
that can have a profound effect,
but it requires work and effort.
You have to put in the hard yards, as it were.
So, to actually pay attention when you're at the meeting,
to pay attention when you're driving your car,
to just taste the food when you're eating,
just to give yourself a mental break.
It's profoundly important for mental and physical health.
- Over the last decade, last 15 years,
there's been a really major change
in the way society has reacted to mental disorders.
There's been much more in the way of community leaders,
famous people, important people,
admitting to, acknowledging that they've got mental illness.
- It's been tremendous to see that many elite athletes
who struggled with issues,
and to have the courage to be able to speak about it,
and to be a role model and example.
I was very happy one day
when the Richmond Club psychologist came
to some mindfulness training I was running
for the Australian Psychological Society.
I said if you wanna bring it in,
it's gotta be more than just a little five minute diversion
from time to time through some meditation.
It needs to be part of the culture,
and they really picked it up, and ran with it.
And, over the last few years,
they've done an absolutely wonderful job with it.
They've really built a strong connected culture.
It's really a wonderful example.
- I think we have to convince employers
to invest in the mental health of their workforce
because we know in working while sick,
but being unproductive,
has immense cost to Australian employers.
It's estimated around 30 Billion per year.
- Everybody agrees on the importance of these things,
but in the workplace, there has been no systematic way
to introduce policies, to evaluate them,
and to basically have a holistic approach
to understanding workplace health and well-being.
- We have one of the best physical health systems
in the world,
but then we have tagged on to this physical health system
a mental health system.
- The Victoria (murmurs) Journal handed down its report,
and it showed that there were major problems.
There's been a dramatic increase
in emergency department presentations
of people with mental illness.
More than 50% who are going to be admitted
have to wait more than eight hours,
and the number of days
that people are able to stay in wards and be treated
has gone down.
People are being discharged from hospital much too early,
and that's because there just aren't enough beds.
We need to be forward-looking.
There needs to be economies of scale.
There needs to be an aggregation of expertise.
We can do so much better.
- I think we are now ready as a community, as a society,
to take the next step, to be able to say,
"Okay, well, we've educated people a little bit,
"we've destigmatized a little bit.
"Let's, as a community, as a society, dedicate ourselves
"to achieving the sorts of advances
"that will ultimately lead to the prevention and the cure
"of these disorders."
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