PROFILE
Vaccinating against mental health key to building wellbeing & resilience MICHAEL ESPOSITO
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notable feature of Premier Steven Marshall’s daily press conferences during the recent seven-day lockdown was the regular acknowledgment of the mental health challenges that many people would have faced during this period of enforced isolation. The pandemic has seriously tested the resolve of all of us, intensifying the difficulty of our lives which are already exhausting and complex, without the addition of a global pandemic. But what if we had the psychological tools to rise to any challenge that comes our way? To stave off mental illness by boosting our mental fitness?
VACCINATING AGAINST MENTAL ILLNESS At the start of the pandemic, most of the messaging was around the importance of good hygiene practices to prevent infection. Now we are talking about vaccination as the key to our roadmap out of the pandemic. We should be thinking about mental health in a similar way, argues Gabrielle Kelly, who founded SAHMRI’s Wellbeing and Resilience Centre in 2014, now consulting on building psychological health and resilience, and who is our guest speaker at the Law Society’s legal Profession Dinner on 27 August. She thinks it’s time for the psychological vaccination of the nation to help everyone cope with and thrive in ever-changing life and work. Psychological hygiene, has in Gabrielle’s view, been a missing part of the conversation about mental health, but the tools have been developed not only for individuals to immunise themselves against some mental illness, but for industries and whole communities to be able to build psychological strength. “Just as you can vaccinate yourself against physical illness you can vaccinate yourself against preventable mental illness, by building your mental strength, your resilience and your capacity to withstand, not only the normal challenges of life,
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but the unexpected ones, such as a global pandemic,” Gabrielle said. “If we think about dental hygiene , Gabrielle explained, “we do prevention at the individual and systems level: individuals brush and floss their teeth and we add fluoride to the water system. I think we need to normalise psychological hygiene, so we can avoid some types of mental illness in individuals and that’s essentially what positive psychology is doing. It’s gathering the science of psychology and directing it towards people to help individuals and employees have higher wellbeing and more psychological capital.” Gabrielle said that South Australia was now a world leader in “building wellbeing at scale”, largely thanks to the influence of Professor Martin Seligman, who was a Thinker in Residence in SA in 2012-13. He is a former President of the American Psychological Association who decided to dedicate the rest of his life to preventing of mental illness through positive psychology. When Gabrielle proposed a residency on psychological health and wellbeing to the State Government in 2012, it was viewed with suspicion; the general perception of “wellbeing” was as a kind of lightweight, feel-good, whimsical mantra. “Wellbeing was seen as a women’s thing and maybe a yoga class, and you couldn’t really have a serious conversation about it. By suggesting this residency, I was trying to advance people’s understanding of the scientific evidence about the how and why of building wellbeing, in order to seriously engage with it. By linking the well-established science of wellbeing and resilience, we were able to make the case that building those capacities can help protect against some but not all, mental illness and will help build human resilience, in the face of challenges, such as we see now with COVID and climate impacts” she said. Now, building wellbeing is a thing: it is acknowledged widely as useful and as Seligman put it: “It’s measurable, teachable and learnable”.
Gabrielle Kelly will be guest speaker at the annual Legal Profession Dinner
Seligman’s work with a powerful collaboration of local health and education leaders over 2 years, led Gabrielle to set up the Wellbeing and Resilience Centre within SAHMRI , kickstarting a world-first initiative to measure, build and embed wellbeing across the society, reaching thousands here, both in the community and in workplaces. “That is now an advantage to us here. With the advent of the June 2021, ISO 45003 Psychological Health and Safety at Work , there are new global guidelines for managing psychological injury risk at work. The 2018 Australian Work Health and Safety Act has also created, for the first time, a national legislative obligation for industry to identify and manage psychological injury risk, so the stakes are high for all industry to make workplace wellbeing and the prevention of psychological injury a top priority. Add to this the $17 billion per annum impact of mental illness on absenteeism and presenteeism in the Australian workforce, then the proven positive impact of a psychologically healthy workplace on productivity, recruitment and retention, makes it a must have for business.”
