A parallel Australia - tackling mental health

If you have few social supports or connections then you are more likely to be depressed or anxious - this has been shown in Aussie schoolchildren, US college students, and Finnish adults, just to name a few of the groups.

Similarly in studies in Canada, the US, Australia, UK and Netherlands show that if you are poor, unemployed and underprivileged then anxiety, depression and substance abuse is more likely.

So if they had managed to get things right then perhaps this parallel Australia could actually exist. Our own Australian data, as well as international data suggest that if we had lower levels of social isolation, lower levels of discrimination and less poverty then we’d be considerably less anxious and less depressed as a nation.

And it seems we would be even more productive, because according to the World Health Organisation’s seminal report in 2003 Investing in Mental Health, up to 45 per cent of absenteeism is due to mental health problems.

As I said before, during my recent visit I felt a very strong sense of vibrancy and productivity. You could tell that by the way everything was organised and carefully looked after.

I also noticed two other things - people were outside much more. All across the places I visited and they seemed to walk and cycle, so much so that I thought I was in Europe. They reported that 80 per cent of the school children in years 1-4 walked to and from school. Come to think of it, they even looked a bit thinner.

I asked about crime rates and perceived levels of fear of crime. Their crime rates were lower than ours, but not greatly. The big difference was their levels of fear were so much lower than ours. I could only think of two reasons.

One reason was the fact there seemed such a strong and direct participation in local neighbourhoods - people were out in them - not just hidden in cars or houses, and we know that used spaces tend to be safer.

The second reason came to me by reading their papers, listening to the radio and watching TV - all directly or via the net. Their media didn’t seem to be as hysterical as ours sometimes get. They had a few tabloid and broadsheet ranters but overall they didn’t seem as determined to pit different parts of the community against each other, nor were they intent on scaring the community either.

They showed the same level of concern about things like global terrorism and avian flu, but the level of fear seemed to be less than it is here - but this is wholly subjective - they didn’t have measures for it and neither do we. On the other hand it does make some sense given that it’s been proposed that social networks improve the well being of individuals under stress by acting as a buffer or moderator of that stress - perhaps they also act in the same way at a population level.

They were as multi-cultural as we are, if not more so. But they reported a high level of cross-cultural harmony. They had developed purposeful projects, then systems, based on the contact hypothesis to ensure different ethnic, racial and cultural groups could work, learn and play together in mutually respectful and equal ways.

I also asked them about the general level of understanding about depression, anxiety and psychiatric disorders. They said the stigma of mental illness had declined and that empathy was high. They had been working on teaching MHFA (mental health first aid) across the country for many years. It had become just as accepted as physical first aid like cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). They also showed me figures on the huge increase in support for people at (mental health) risk, and their families and friends through Internet-based support and counselling services, operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.