PHAA
The inaugural Preventive Mental Health Symposium, to be held in Melbourne on 12 March, is a must for anyone interested in mental wellbeing promotion and mental ill-health prevention.
Dr Stephen Carbone, is CEO of Prevention United and symposium sponsor, and is also a Co-Convenor of PHAA’s Mental Health Special Interest Group.
He talked to us about his advocacy, passion for preventive mental health, and excitement for delivering the timely event.
What’s been your career trajectory to date, and why did you decide to found Prevention Utd?
I guess you could say I’ve had an unusual career trajectory. After graduating from medicine and completing my intern year, I was tossing up between a career in general practice and a career in psychiatry. I oscillated between the two for some time, before eventually settling on general practice, but I always maintained a strong interest in mental health.
I was also someone who didn’t just want to be a clinician and was very interested in the policy side of things.
I was lucky enough to land a role in the Mental Health Branch of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services in the early 2000s where I first became involved in efforts to improve the supports and services available to people experiencing mental health difficulties.
From there, I worked in various policy roles at Orygen Youth Health, headspace and Beyond Blue focused on the same thing – trying to improve the mental healthcare system.
It was during a brief stint at VicHealth that my career took another turn.
Working there, it dawned on me that Australia’s mental health policy was almost entirely focused on supporting people after they had already started to experience significant mental health difficulties and there was very little emphasis on promoting good mental health and trying to prevent mental health conditions from occurring in the first place.
While VicHealth was taking this approach in Victoria, it seemed like there was a gap at the national level, and so a couple of former colleagues from Beyond Blue and I decided to establish Prevention United.
We wanted to create an organisation that could raise awareness about the importance of focusing ‘upstream’ on promotion and prevention and that could advocate to governments around Australia to increase their action and investment in this critical aspect of mental health policy.
What have been your proudest achievements or successes with Prevention United to date?
Still being around after six years is definitely a big success!
But on a more serious note, I think our biggest success has been in building a coalition of like-minded individuals and organisations to raise the profile of this endeavour.
Collectively, our advocacy efforts are starting to pay off. At a practice level, we’re seeing an increase in the number of individuals and organisations getting involved in this work, and we’re seeing an uplift in Australia’s capacity and capability in promotion and prevention.
At a policy level, governments around the country are starting to look at how they can stem and reverse the rising tide of mental ill-health in the community through a focus on tackling the underlying drivers of mental ill-health, and increasing people’s access to key protective factors.
Several jurisdictions are developing strategies focused on promotion and prevention, and we’re confident that an increase in funding for mental wellbeing promotion and mental ill-health prevention initiatives will soon start to flow.
We’ve moved from pre-contemplation, to contemplation and now action on the part of government!
What do you hope Preventive Mental Health symposium attendees will gain from the gathering?
The promotion of mental wellbeing and the (primary) prevention of mental health conditions is a complex endeavour.
Success requires a multi-modal, whole-of-government and whole-of-community approach to positively change the balance of mental health risk and protective factors in the settings in which people learn, work and live. Everyone has a contribution to make.
At present, many of the leaders in the field are based in the mental health sector.
Yet it’s clear that individuals working in health promotion, public health and other sectors have a lot to offer. We therefore need to find a way to create a multidisciplinary approach to this issue.
The symposium provides an opportunity for those who are not familiar with this issue to hear from some of Australia’s leading experts and find out what we know, and what we don’t know when it comes to mental wellbeing promotion and preventive mental health.
For those who are already familiar with the evidence, it provides an opportunity to strengthen their professional networks and forge links with people from diverse disciplines and sectors who are working to advance this area of practice, policy and research.
I’m confident that everyone who attends will learn something new, connect with someone new, and walk away feeling better equipped to contribute to this important field of endeavour.
Was there anything else you wished to add?
It has famously been said there can be no health without mental health, and the symposium provides an opportunity for those working in health promotion and public health to learn how they can contribute to the promotion of mental wellbeing and the prevention of mental health conditions, and ensure that every Australian experiences their best possible physical health and their best possible mental health.
Save 10% off face-to-face registrations for the Preventive Mental Health Symposium, using discount code SALE10. Ends Wed 21 Feb.
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