Sowing the seeds of mental health parity

Mental illness and social inequity often go hand in hand. In rural and regional communities where stoic self-reliance is often the prevailing expectation, the impact is amplified.

“Mental illness places individuals at a significant disadvantage in terms of education, relational and occupational achievement,” explains Dr Rachael Murrihy, Director of The Kidman Centre (TKC) at UTS.

“From a societal perspective, it constitutes a serious economic and social burden and represents an important public policy and community issue. Geographic location further compounds this for people with mental illness; those in regional and rural areas are much less likely to receive adequate evidence-based psychological care than their city counterparts.”

It’s a complex issue with profound socio-cultural roots, but early intervention could be the key to unlocking a dramatic shift in the landscape. This is the ambition underpinning Thrive, a preventative mental health training program Murrihy and her TKC colleagues are rolling out in schools with the support of a UTS Social Impact Grant.

“Thrive aims to foster positive change through the creation of systemic support structures in regional schools in order to prevent and alleviate mental illness and impact a young person’s life trajectory – with direct flow-on effects to their family and wider community,” she says.

“Research shows that there is a significant window of opportunity in the childhood years to intervene and alter life paths through multi-layered support systems. By weaving the program into schools – the most important systemic institution for children in their communities – we can circumvent factors that discourage help-seeking and give children the tools to understand and manage their emotions, placing them at less risk for future life stressors.”

Commencing in 2018, the initiative set a target to provide mental health training for staff at 192 schools across regional NSW over a three-year period, with potential to reach 12,000 students. At its core is a methodology known as CPS – Collaborative and Proactive Solutions – developed by Harvard Medical School researcher Dr Ross Greene. The approach calls on the adult to reframe the child’s challenging behaviour, on the presumption that the child doesn’t actually want to behave ‘badly’ but instead lacks necessary skills such as flexibility and emotional regulation.

Training is focused on increasing confidence, knowledge, efficacy and application of socio-emotional competencies among school staff, empowering them to use these skills in their

daily interactions with students to cultivate positive social and emotional development and build resilience. Sustainability is embedded in the Thrive model; participants go on to train their existing colleagues, who in turn pass the skills to new staff as turnover occurs, helping maintain improved structures in the longer term.

The first sessions were conducted in Armidale in Northern NSW in October 2018, with 41 participants representing 34 schools across the full spectrum of primary education. The feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive, with 95 per cent agreeing that they had gained helpful skills they could take back into schools to support children and teenagers with emotional and behavioural problems.

“Quantitative data, feedback from evaluation forms and in-depth interviews yielded consistent data that school staff believed they had adequately learnt a new approach to working with their students, and that they felt better able to handle challenging situations and maintain positive relationships with them,” Murrihy says.

The program is in high demand, already surpassing original targets to deliver training with transformative impact in more than 200 schools to date. The grant has been crucial in enabling the team to expand the scope and reach of the project.

As rural communities are increasingly strained by the impact of climate, Murrihy says Thrive is part of a larger systemic vision at TKC and UTS to improve support and outcomes in mental health beyond our cities.

“The response thus far affirms that techniques like this are desperately needed, and the issues faced by drought-affected families have been a recurring theme; children are suffering but don’t want to further burden their parents,” she says.

“The principal of one regional NSW school reported that nine out of ten students were experiencing significant emotional and behavioural problems. We’re now looking at other ways we can better support youth in rural and regional Australia, such as peer support programs and online training modules for parents, so that no child falls through the cracks.”