Australia’s Mental Health is in Your Hands I’ve had lots of proud weeks in my life, and this is definitely one of them. We are on the eve of launching Australia’s Biggest Mental Health Check-in 2017 . It provides a private, proactive and personalised dashboard for the mind and the body to see how each of us are tracking. Partnering with Medibio, the world’s first objective measure of stress , we lead a new age of better measurement and positive change in mental health. The Check-in comes as the World Health Organisation announce that depression is now officially the leading cause of ill health on the planet, up 18% over the past decade. Australia’s Biggest Mental Health Check-in was created to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health. It aims to let people know they’re not alone, and to encourage a more proactive approach to mental health. But there’s another reason for checking in that I know better than most, and that is that up to 60% of people don’t even realise when th...

Lately I’ve been trying to move over during my park bench reflections of life and make a space for Vulnerability to join me. Truthfully, I’m thinking of bringing it a coffee and a donut, we’ve been hanging out so much.   Passers-by sometimes notice us sitting together and look at me like I’ve just been seated next to someone on a long haul flight who has a nasty hacking cough.    I’m normally doing the equivalent of running laps around the park and I don’t always stop and sit here. There are too many things to do. I’m a psychologist, mum, employer, wife, volunteer Board member and patron, among other things. I love all of it and feel gratitude beyond expression. But sometimes I quietly also notice that it is a hell of a pace.   In my work, I’ve been noticing how many people describe that, psychologically, they are “always on”.   They know they have high anxiety but worry that if they turn down the sensitivity of their radar it might dilute their product...

Psychological health, data and meeting the challenge to organisations When I was small, I read the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes.  The Emperor was tricked into thinking his thread was visible only to the smartest people in the land. No one dared say that to their eyes the Emperor was naked (even though he actually  was  naked) until a small child spoke up, unencumbered by what others thought of him.  The truth is, I have been designing and delivering organisational psychological health interventions for decades without really having hard data to tell me if what we were doing was enough.  It’s not enough. And there are 3 things I’ve been unable to ignore: Mental health issues are increasing faster than societal awareness or our efficiency in addressing them (33% of some sectors have a diagnosable disorder, with 61% of these never receiving professional support and only 3% on average using their EAP). Stigma, lack of awareness and confidentiality ar...