Please see Joanne Smith

Drawing on the resilience of Aboriginal children, young people and families is the foundation of the Ballarat and District Aboriginal Cooperative (BADAC) child and adolescent mental health program.
The program combines evidenced based mental health practice with the cultural knowledge and lived experience of Aboriginal staff, clients and families.

Our program team consists of a youth mental health clinician and an Aboriginal youth worker.

Program features:
• Focusing on building trust with community and clients.
• Providing treatment within BADAC, rather than referring to external agencies.
• Working with anyone wanting support, not just those experiencing severe mental illness.
• Including the significant people in clients’ lives, such as family and schools, in assessments and treatment interventions.
• A comprehensive assessment followed by an evidence based intervention e.g. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (C.B.T), Acceptance and Commitment (A.C.T), problem solving, conflict resolution, family counselling and parent work.

Diagnoses of anxiety disorders are most prevalent made followed by depression and externalising disorders. Some clients do not fit diagnostic categories. In these cases, we see clients benefiting from stable nurturing family environments and our role is to validate and strengthen relationships. Before and after Strength and Difficulties questionnaires are used to inform interventions and to evidence outcomes. Data gathered shows improvements in emotional and conduct domains for most clients.

In the first six months of the program we’ve worked with 43 families. It’s early days but initial encounters are promising. We use client outcome data and feedback from stakeholders to evolve our model e.g. we are reducing documentation to make our work more accessible. We will continue to test and develop our model to improve mental health for Aboriginal children and young people in the Ballarat district.

Please see Dr Kelly Baird

Please see Gill Goodman

In this new decade, digital mental health leadership means working to redefine the intersection between young people, mental health and technology. In a rapidly changing market with service user expectations increasing, how do we reimagine digital mental health services so that they continue to be relevant and engaging for young people?

At Australia’s leading digital youth mental health organisation, ReachOut, we are evolving our service to create a personalised digital mental health ecosystem for young people that is driven by data, distribution and collaboration. Fundamentally different from traditional bricks and mortar mental health services, ReachOut is a non-traditional service that is rooted in non-clinical, yet evidence-based help-seeking and online peer support. Using human-centred design thinking, global experience language and engaging young people at every touchpoint, our service looks at how technology can intervene to architect the way that we deliver customer experiences and champion transformative digital youth mental health innovation.
With young people’s expectations of digital services constantly evolving, investing in innovation and operating a continuous improvement model to ensure mental health services and products are responding in real time to the needs and wants of the next generation is becoming so important. Co-designing these services and products for young people with young people will help to connect them with accessible and thoughtful information, community and support pathways they need to be happy and well.

3 x Key Learnings:
● Human-centred design and design thinking as a methodology.
● Building a data warehouse and service personalisation.
● Exploring transformative innovation and the customer experience journey.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people report higher levels of psychological distress than non-Aboriginal young people, with up to three in 10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people rating high to very high levels of distress from mood or anxiety symptoms compared to 13% of non-Aboriginal people. The symptoms associated with anxiety and depressive disorders can cause significant life interference for youth and their parents. Life interference is the ways in which symptoms impact a young person’s life such as their participation in school, the quality of their relationships and so on. Although there are multiple validated measures for assessing anxiety and depressive symptoms and disorders in the general population, there are only a few culturally validated measures to assess Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth, none of which focus on life interference. Further no research has examined how life interference is defined culturally and what areas it significantly impacts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youths’ lives. Thus, current data on the prevalence of mental health may not accurately reflect true prevalence of mental ill-health, nor the impact it has on young people’s lives. The present study aims to gather an understanding of what life interference from internalising disorders means in the cultural context of Indigenous Australia. 50 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people with anxiety and/or depression, their carers and service providers will be interviewed. Data will be analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Children's development and mental health is significantly influenced by their experiences in families, education settings and communities. They are also affected by technology and broader societal factors. As we continue to respond to, and understand the impacts of, the COVID19 pandemic, it is necessary to notice children's distress, sometimes expressed through suicidality.

This session will explore factors which are known to impact on children's mental health, including individual, family and societal factors. The increasing role of technology with its benefits and risks will be included. A review of what we know about risk and protective factors related to children's suicide risk will be provided, taking into account the limitations of research evidence in this area for children.

Specific pandemic related issues such as the lockdown and learning from home experiences for many children and families will also be explored with a review of research from within Australia and internationally. The benefits of mental health promotion and preventative approaches will be outlined along with consideration of effective ways to support parents and carers and educators to both recognise and respond effectively to the earliest possible signs that a child may be experiencing distress. Collaborative approaches between children and young people, families, education settings, community agencies and mental health professionals is most likely to achieve best results to improve children's mental health.

This presentation will provide an overview of research as well as draw upon the presenter's clinical experience and reflections as a psycholist working with children, young people and families during lockdowns in Melbourne during 2020 and 2021. Practical suggestions and evidence-based resources will be incorporated into the presentation to support delegates' responses in their work.

Please see Dr Kelly Baird

In 2018, as part of the National Suicide Prevention Trial, the Darwin site steering committee identified that the national approach to promoting help-seeking, mental health, and suicide prevention in schools needed to be strengthened to include place-based approaches relevant to, and appropriate for, First Nations young people living in the Darwin region.

headspace Schools were commissioned to co-design a resource which supported young people to build the skills required to help seek using a development process that facilitated local ownership, knowledge, and experience.

The first phase of this project resulted in the production of a video containing local images encompassing the ideas and strategies which First Nations Peoples identified as ‘Strengthening Our Spirits’. The video clearly contained local messages, but further work was needed for young people to develop the necessary mental health literacies required to implement the help seeking messages of the resource.

Phase two of the project was to co-design a training program to complement the video. The program needed to be culturally appropriate and evidence informed to explicitly teach young people the micro skills needed to seek help at times of crisis (suicide prevention), whilst also building skills in the areas of mental health promotion, prevention, and early intervention which were required to facilitate suicide prevention.

To ensure cultural and clinical safety, the development and design process was a collaboration between headspace Schools, a locally established First Nations Reference Group, young people, and key community stakeholders.

The resulting Our Way Our Say program aims to increase social and emotional competencies of middle and senior school aged young people in the elements of Water (introduction to mental health and wellbeing), Land (belonging, inclusion, and connectedness), Fire (understanding and managing emotions) and Air (voice and empowerment), then combine these learnings in Strengthening our Spirits (help seeking and suicide prevention).

This presentation will discuss the outcomes of three pilot Circle of Security Parenting (COSP) programs for LGBTIQA+ parents facilitated by Tresillian Family Care Centre staff and funded by Central and Eastern Sydney Public Health Network (CESPHN). CESPHN identified a gap in service provision for this population. While it is now recognised that children from LGBTIQA+ families are no more at risk of insecure attachment than those with heterosexual parents, discrimination amongst this group remains an issue. LGBTIQA+ individuals are more likely to require and seek mental health services than the general population, but are less likely to be satisfied with the service they receive.1 Common barriers to help-seeking include discrimination and lack of LGBTIQA+ sensitive services. Our aim was to reduce barriers and improve satisfaction by offering a specific group for LGBTIQA+ parents. In our preparation and design of this pilot, the creation of a safe space or ‘secure base’ for exploration of the unique experiences of LGBTIQA+ families in the context of improving parent-child attachment was a priority. This presentation will explore the ways we worked to co-create and collaborate with participants in the cultivation of an environment of safety, containment and respect: essential prerequisites for learning for all parents. Some staff facilitating these groups identify as members of the LGBTIQA+ community which we saw as integral in ensuring an understanding of how to tailor the group for the community. Through our evaluations, we will discuss whether these goals were achieved for participants. Preliminary findings indicate participants valued facilitators identifying as LGBTIQA+, and meeting with other LGBTIQA+ parents. Going forward, we aim to involve parents in future course development.
1. Knight KW, Stephenson SE, West S, et al. The kids are OK: it is discrimination not same-sex parents that harms children. Med J Aust. 2017;207(9):374-375.