Mind Moves:On my current learning tour of youth mental health initiatives in Australia, my first stop was to an organisation called Inspire, based in Sydney. I was particularly interested in its flagship programme, Reachout!, an innovative approach to providing youth mental health services via the web.
Inspire was founded by Jack Heath, former adviser and speechwriter to prime minister Paul Keating, after he had experienced death by suicide in a family relative. His vision was simple - to create opportunities for young people to change their world.
Initially the focus of Inspire was to reach those whose personal world was filled with suicidal distress. In the past decade Inspire's focus has broadened to "working with young people to take action on issues they care about, to experiencing new ways to learn, grow and have fun."
In establishing Reach Out!, Heath believed the internet offered a unique way to engage with troubled youths that had never been possible before. Young people could go online anonymously, access health information that could increase their understanding of their own problems, read stories of their peers who'd made it through similar tough times, and tell their own story in a safe, confidential way.
And they could do this at a low cost and without fear of being stigmatised.
Reachout! now attracts 180,000 visitors monthly. Fifty per cent of these are new visitors and the average length of time spent at this site is 15 minutes. It provides information, co-authored with young people, explaining a wide range of common experiences associated with depression, eating difficulties, alcohol and other drugs.
It identifies where they can access help and demystifies the entire process of help-seeking. It explains very clearly what it is like to talk to a counsellor, go see a doctor or phone a helpline. Research has shown that after visiting Reachout!, 74 per cent of young people reported they spoke to someone regarding their difficulties and 38 per cent reported seeing a professional.
The success of Reachout! is largley due to the critical role that young people play in developing and branding the site. Inspire is an organisation that does much more than pay lip service to the notion of youth participation. It invests time and resources in developing its youth advisers and ambassadors to ensure that the service continues to be relevant, practical and inspiring.
Rosie Beaton (18), one of its ambassadors, told me how she had originally logged on to Reachout! to find some information that would enable her to support a close friend caught up in a crisis. Gradually she became more involved to the extent that she gave a keynote address at a recent international conference on adolescent psychiatry in Melbourne. Her success there has led to an invitation to speak at a similar conference in Singapore this year.
Branding has been a key strategy for Reachout! The PR company it employed said it should make Reachout! a youth brand, such that when young people were in a tough place they would go online for support, as naturally as they might reach for a Coca Cola if they were thirsty.
Heath and his staff considered lots of angles, slanting their emphasis positively in terms of wellbeing and resilience. But their youth advisers had other ideas and came up with the branding slogan Life sucks now a website, which is displayed all over Sydney on billboards and posters.
Inspire is driven by clearly articulated values and principles that harness youth idealism towards social action and social inclusion. In addition to the Reachout! website, it has another site called ActNow which provides young people with opportunities to take action on social issues that affect them and their community. Within this site young people define what action makes most sense to them, be it volunteering, campaigning, fundraising or simply gaining a deeper understanding of social issues so that they are better able to articulate their opinions.
But, you may say, not every young person uses the web. To reach those who don't, Inspire has partnered with 20 youth centres around Australia to establish Beanbag Centres which deliver comprehensive training in digital technology. The KickArse and Digital Eye programmes they run in these centres teach young people multimedia skills to enable them tell stories through film and photography and to share these within their own communities.
For anyone concerned with engaging young people who are facing tough times or who are socially excluded, Inspire offers a lot of possibilities.
There are individuals and groups in Ireland who are already using the internet and multimedia technology to engage young people around health issues. Inspire is eager to offer to Ireland all that it has already put in place and to support us in creating our own Irish front end to these services and make them accessible to young people here. Perhaps it is time to ask what our young people would like and to proceed with a feasibility study to see if this approach would be relevant and inspiring for them.
Tony Bates is chief executive of Headstrong - The National Centre for Youth Mental Health. The web addresses for the above initiatives are: www.reachout.com.au; www.actnow.com.au; www.beanbag.net.au
