Four years, ten cities, 28 interviews and one big question took me from reporting on mental health to doing something about it. Here’s what I found.
I had been investigating what adults could do to look after our minds and now he was telling me that for many people, the most important window had closed long before they were 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 little 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.
I wanted to know what the science said about techniques like mindfulness, growth mindset and resilience training, and whether they were the solution. 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.”
“So maybe they don’t need superpowers after all?” I asked. “Correct,” he said.
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?
Everywhere I went, I found ordinary people doing the extraordiarily 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 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 community nurse caring for the mothers and babies of an entire 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. It was the adults in kid’s lives, the safety of their homes, the culture of their schools, the communities they grow up in. Masten calls it “ordinary magic”.
A private school in Adelaide and a village in the Himalayas could hardly be further apart, but the ingredients were the same. By the end of my travels, I was convinced that preventing mental illness is possible. But it troubled me that the people and programs I’d filmed were running on short-term grants and goodwill, and some were one funding round away from closing.
It turns out prevention offers the kind of Return On Investment most investors 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. They 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.
Here’s how you can see it
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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