Experts Know How to Prevent Mental Illness. So Why Don’t “They” Do It?

Four years, ten cities, 28 interviews and one big question took me from reporting on mental health to doing something about it.

Here is what I found.

I’d spent a year meditating every day, with a team of scientists measuring what it did to my brain and body. I’d released a film and a book about it and done countless interviews about the idea that mindfulness is a form of mental fitness training that offers a solution to rising mental illness. But all the while, one fact was echoing in my mind and making me wonder if I’d been asking the wrong question. It came from Professor Willem Kuyken, one of the world’s leading mindfulness researchers from Oxford University. “Half of all mental illness,” he told me, “begins by the age of 14.

I had been investigating we could do to look after our minds as adults and now he was telling me that for many people, the most important window had closed long before we are old enough to download a meditation app. I couldn’t let it go. If most mental illness starts in childhood, I wondered, why do we spend almost all our effort on treatment once people are already unwell?

That question would take me away from this blog for four years to make my new film, Raising Superheroes. At first I assumed I knew where it would lead. Like my previous projects, The Whole Health Life, The Connection and My Year of Living Mindfully, I thought Raising Superheroes would involve distilling scientific knowledge into neat takeaways all of us could understand and use. A simple 12-month project, I thought. Maybe a neat little ebook with the ten things parents need to know about protecting their children’s wellbeing. How wrong I was.

One of my first phone calls was to Professor Frank Oberklaid, a prolific scientist and one of Australia’s most respected paediatricians. He spent more than 25 years as founding director of the Centre for Community Child Health at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital and co-chaired the expert group behind Australia’s National Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy. I explained my idea – in the wake of the pandemic, amid rising costs, increasing division and unrelenting uncertainty, I was making a film about the mental superpowers our kids would need to thrive in the world we’re handing them.

Professor Frank Oberklaid

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

I wanted to know what the science said about techniques like mindfulness, growth mindset and resilience training, and whether providing kids with mental training was a solution to rising mental illness. Frank’s response set me on an entirely different course. “There are no silver bullets,” he said. “We can’t expect children to do this by themselves. We have to start looking at the systems around children and families. We’ve known this for decades.”

“So maybe they don’t need superpowers after all?” I asked.

“Correct,” he said.

Ordinary Magic

My question took me to ten cities, from Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide in Australia to Boston, Nashville and Detroit in the United States, and to remote villages in far eastern Nepal. I sat with developmental scientists and neuroscientists, teachers, paediatricians and parents, and asked them all the same question. What actually protects a child’s mental health?

Principal Mathew Portell at Goodlettsville Elementary, Nashville
Trauma Informed Education School

Everywhere I went, I found ordinary people doing the extraordinarily important work that keeps kids well and helps them to thrive. A wellbeing teacher in Adelaide who banned phones and watched his students start talking to each other again. A principal in Nashville who stopped suspending traumatised kids and started asking what had happened to them. A community leader in Detroit, determined to break intergenerational trauma by transforming abandoned buildings into hubs of opportunity. And high in the mountains of Nepal, I met a nurse creating caring and connection among the mothers and babies of an entire far-flung valley.

Their answers kept pointing away from the individual child and towards the world around them. University of Minnesota Professor Ann Masten, who has spent her career studying why some children thrive against the odds, told me she’d started out her career expecting to find something rare or special about them. Instead, her research kept turning up the same thing: the adults in kid’s lives, the safety of their homes, the culture of their schools, and living in a community that gives them a sense of purpose and somewhere to go. These protective factors cushion kids from adversity and help them bounce back when life gets hard. And what struck Masten most was how ordinary they are. They aren’t rare gifts some children are born with. They’re built into everyday relationships and places, which means we can build more of them. She calls it “ordinary magic”.

So what's the hold up

If we know what works, and people are already doing it, why isn’t it happening everywhere, especially in the first 1,000 days of life and in adolescence, two of the most important windows in a child’s development? I assumed the answer was money. Governments have competing priorities, and maybe prevention was simply too costly. So I set out to follow the money and find out whether prevention really made dollars and sense.

It turns out prevention offers the kind of return on investment most people only dream of. In Nepal, a country with fewer than 200 psychiatrists for almost 30 million people, a village health program like the one I filmed costs less than a dollar per person. Here in Australia, the Productivity Commission recently handed down a report showing that money spent stopping problems early comes back to government roughly twice over. And when researchers from the University of Melbourne modelled the returns on preventing anxiety and depression in teenagers, they found the best prevention programs returned between five and nineteen dollars for every dollar spent.

To find out why Australia doesn’t leap at this opportunity to change lives for future generations while also saving money, I travelled to Parliament House in Canberra with the Wellbeing and Prevention Coalition, an alliance of more than 20 of Australia’s leading mental health organisations, led by Prevention United and including Beyond Blue, Movember , Reach Out, Black Dog Institute, headspace and Orygen. They estimate Australia spends less than 1% of its mental health budget on prevention and made a compelling case to the Health Minister to lift that to 5%, in line with the government’s own National Preventive Health Strategy. Hands were shaken, photos were taken, and then… nothing.

The trouble, I learned, isn’t the cost. It’s the timing. Prevention asks a government to spend money now so that a child, possibly not yet born, grows into an adult who doesn’t get sick. By then, the politician who signed the cheque is long gone. Nobody holds a press conference for an illness that never happened.

I came back from Parliament House frustrated that the case for prevention had fallen on deaf ears. When I sat down with Professor Oberklaid again, I asked him why “they” didn’t just fix it. He looked at me for a moment, then said: “There is no they.”

I’ve thought about those four words more than almost anything anyone has said to me in twenty years of journalism. He meant that no department, minister, or expert advisory committee is waiting in the wings to put prevention on the agenda. If prevention is going to happen, it’s going to be because people outside the system push for it.

Then he told me something I didn’t expect from someone with more than 150 scientific papers to his name. “I used to believe that if I did good research and published it in high-quality journals, the world would change,” he said. “Nothing happened. So I think I started to understand you had to do more than good research. You had to translate that.”

I recognised myself in his words immediately. I got into journalism believing a good story was enough to change the world. I was trained in objectivity. My job was to ask the questions, gather the evidence and hand it to you so you could make up your own mind. That’s what I did with The Whole Health Life, The Connection and My Year of Living Mindfully, and I’m proud of that work.

But if there is no “they”, then reporting on a problem and walking away starts to look like part of the problem. So in the last part of this new film, I do something I was trained never to do. I pick a side. The side is children, and the evidence that we can do far more to protect their mental health than we currently do.

Years ago, on a meditation retreat, I came to see that a still mind and a peaceful inner life are only half the picture. We also have to tend the world outside us, especially the one our kids are growing up in.

Raising Superheroes is where those two halves of my work finally meet.

Watch the Official Trailer

What happens now?

The film premiered in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in October and Perth in November. It’s now travelling to communities, schools and workplaces around Australia. It’s also the starting point for a national campaign with Prevention United and a growing alliance of organisations, which I’ll tell you about in future posts.

Here’s how you can see it

Go to the new Raising Superheroes website

Join a free online screening from 19 to 25 November 2026.
Register to see the film here.
Host a screening at your school, workplace or community group. In-person screenings are free to host until March 2027, and I’ve written a guide to help. Register to host a screening here.

This blog is coming back to life too. Each week I’ll be sharing what I learned making the film, including the science, the people, the things that surprised me, and what we can all be doing to prevent mental illness and promote wellbeing. It’s the same kind of journalism you signed up for, with a bit more skin in the game.

It’s good to be back.

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My projects

Raising Superheroes

A mother’s search for answers to the youth mental health crisis leads her across the world, to a truth she did not expect to find, and into a fight she never expected to join.

My Year of Living Mindfully

My Year of Living Mindfully is the new feature documentary from journalist and filmmaker Shannon Harvey. Overwhelmed with insomnia and an incurable…

The Connection

ABOUT THE FILM The Connection is a feature documentary that uncovers the latest science in mind body medicine and proves we have much more to say a…

The Whole Health Life

“In The Whole Health Life Shannon Harvey writes with real heart, relentless honesty, journalistic insight and broad understanding. On top of all th…