0Hugh’s message is Simple. Don’t be afraid to speak up. Find a trusted person, and talk to them if you’re worried.
This guest post today is by our friend Hugh Stephens, who is campaigning to raise awareness for youth mental health issues. Hugh will be a panel member at our next Wellbeing Series and is running the Hard Knock Life youth conference in September with another Lantern friend Briony Walker. In December this year Hugh and his friend Tom are planning to cross from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole, so …Over to Hugh
I’m preaching to the converted here, but it’s about time that we do something on a larger scale to advocate about youth mental health issues. Identified multiple times as a priority area for youth health, mental health just hasn’t gotten onto the national agenda and into the minds of young Australians. With 1 in 4 young people experiencing mental illness, it’s time to get more people in the spotlight to fight the stigma that leads to so many not reaching out for help early.
There have been some great successes, and I’ve been proud to be a part of Ehon Chan’s “Soften the Fck Up”, a campaign targeting the ‘harden up’ attitude about men in Australia.
One Step Further is my project. Tom Blunt and myself are crossing from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole at the end of this year. 1300km over 30 days in sub-zero temperatures. Just on cross-country skis with sleds – no supply drops or assistance outside an emergency. Why? To raise awareness for youth mental health, through creating something that the media can report on that is directly linked to social change.
What is our message? Simple. Don’t be afraid to speak up. Find a trusted person, and talk to them if you’re worried.
I’ve learned first-hand how important it is to have someone tell you to go and get help. Not everyone has the courage and self-awareness to know when things have gone beyond being a bit down (or up, or sideways, or backwards) for a while. But to get there, you need to open up and be open to listen to someone else’s advice.
The expedition will provide access to a specialist online mental health screening tool that assesses a wide range of mental illnesses and interacts directly with GPs who can take further action if necessary. We’re also planning a conference in September before the expedition to talk about youth issues and how to participate and create meaningful change in communities: local, national and international.
We’ll also launch after the expedition a special funding program for small community youth mental health projects or programs. Details will be announced soon on our website.
We’d love to hear from you, or you can follow the expedition on our website http://onestepfurther2011.com.au or our Twitter (@osf2011) and Facebook pages (http://facebook.com/onestepfurther). Soon we’re launching our sponsor a kilometre scheme to let anyone sponsor a km of the trek – so follow our website or sign up for our email list to find out more!
Hugh Stephens, August 2011.
CEO blog for July
Although it is winter and the temptation is to curl up and slow down, this is not happening at Lantern! The August newsletter is packed full of stories of our many adventures during June and July, including Naidoc week, two lovely seaside outings to St Kilda and Mornington and an adventurous trip to the snow with the Mind respite program.
In July I had the pleasure of being a panellist at the NAB Staff Forum on youth mental health, alongside Lifeline, headspace and Reach Foundation. There was some great information shared, but for me the thing that resonated most strongly was the importance of listening.
Listening and not solving. Listening and being truly present. Today we get so busy that we often do two things at once, reading our emails on our iPhones as we sit at the dinner table for example. To be truly present with someone means switching our full attention to them.
When people we care about are troubled it is only natural that we want to help them and sometimes we try too hard and start given advice or taking it on ourselves to solve their problems. I need to remind myself constantly to work on my active listening skills. Acknowledging the other persons feelings, offering to listen and being truly present with them is validating. When people feel safe and validated they will be able to release their feelings in a healthy, safe and supportive way which is often the start to feeling better and being able to solve their own problems.
Coming up in August we have Kerryn Burgoyne presenting at our Wellbeing Series on Asperger’s Syndrome. In September the Wellbeing Series will feature the topic of ‘Young People, Social Media and Cyber Safety’. Two other important diary notes are Thursday August 25th and the Annual General Meeting on October 26th. These two dates are interconnected. The theme this year’s AGM will be, ‘A day in the life of Lantern’. This is your chance to tell your story and to share what Lantern means to you. We will be filming a short video and taking still photos on Thursday August 25th. We hope lots of you will get involved.
Until next month,
Cheers
Janet Hopkins (CEO)
Some useful links:
nabITAT – National Australia Bank
Lantern’s bookmarks – useful websites and articles via delicious
Blossom Blog – Challenging our assumptions
May 30, 2011
An assumption is something taken for granted; something you believe to be true often without any evidence.
Something came up in a discussion I had with a friend recently. She had assumed she knew what I felt; she did not actually know and was clearly struggling to fit the new information with the old assumption. Has that happened to you?
Assumptions are very handy. We use them all the time. They save us a lot of time and energy. We don’t have to think about everyday things, we just know that things are as they are. We can all have similar assumptions like; ‘all children like lollies’, ‘everyone starts work on Monday morning’, ‘if it’s dark outside its night time’.
We also have personal assumptions developed from our life experience, peer, family and cultural influences. Often these assumptions are embedded and we don’t know they are there until something happens to make us think about them.
What we do when we realise our assumption doesn’t fit any more is really important. We can ignore the evidence and go on as normal or we can have a look at our assumption and review it.
I have had my own assumptions challenged often over the last year. In fact just recently I made an assumption about a person – I thought I knew what it meant to be her in that circumstance and I was clearly wrong. I think of myself as a free thinker with an open, enquiring mind but that’s not always true. That same enquiring mind then went into over drive trying to figure out how I ended up with that conclusion!
Not looking at these assumptions, not thinking about the relevance of the assumption can stop us from exploring and growing, this can stand between us and new life experiences. My suggestion is to at least have a look at the value of your assumption and wonder what it is and is it of value to you now.
Take your assumption out, give it a shake and see what happens when you really look at it closely perhaps it needs adjusting or to be discarded to allow you to see things in a different more relevant way.
Janet Bromley
