We have to be there for all young people in need
ON Tuesday, October 11, thousands of people across the country generously threw their support behind the inaugural headspace day.
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This national day is to ensure that every young person has access to youth-friendly mental health services, no matter where they live.
Headspace day celebrated 10 years of innovation in youth mental health and was also triggered by alarming new research from Orygen and headspace that revealed over 50 per cent of young people were waiting six or more months before seeking help for mental health issues.
This period of waiting and worrying can have detrimental effects – from social isolation to relationship breakdowns.
The research also uncovered that close to 50 per cent of young people said financial cost was a barrier in preventing them from getting treatment.
Nearly half said they believed they could not be helped.
We need to change these perceptions.
With 95 centres across Australia, integrated with a phone and online chat service eheadspace, headspace has, over the past decade, enabled more than 270,000 young people to access mental health care.
We will soon expand to 110 headspace centres thanks to the Government’s election commitment and a ringing endorsement of headspace as its model for youth mental health care for the future.
Headspace has made outstanding progress over the past 10 years, but we still have a way to go.
Access is crucial and seeking help is the first step that every young person must make and we need to continue to provide effective and easy pathways to make sure this can happen for everyone.
We want to see every Australian community with a headspace centre.
If you would like to support headspace, visit headspaceday.org.au to see how you and your local community can get involved or give a donation.
Professor Patrick McGorry,
headspace founding board member
Fight for equality under the law has been achieved
A NOTABLE symbol of the fight for equality in modern history can be found in the person of Rosa Louise McCauley Parks. Rosa was an African-American civil rights activist whom the United States Congress proclaimed "the first lady of civil rights”.
Among many of the discriminatory laws in America during Rosa’s lifetime was a law requiring coloured people to give up their bus seat to white passengers. On December 1, 1955 in Alabama, Rosa refused to obey her bus driver’s demands to give up her seat and move further to the rear “coloured” section of the bus - a brave act that became a symbol of the modern civil rights movement. Today, Rosa is widely celebrated as "the mother of the freedom movement” and a true champion of equality.
In contrast, the current battle for so-called “marriage equality” is a far cry from the equality Rosa fought for. Changing the law to allow same-sex couples to marry would change the very meaning and purpose of marriage and, as a result, any fight for equality immediately ends in humiliating defeat.
Rosa didn’t seek to change the unchangeable, but simply fought to be treated equally under the law regardless of the colour of her skin. The fight for same-sex couples to have their relationships treated equally under the law was achieved in 2008 through the changes to over 80 pieces of legislation. However, if this fight for a concept of marriage equality is realised, marriage under this new order will become completely unrecognisable.
In fact, what those fighting for marriage equality are doing is diminishing and even destroying marriage as it had existed for millennia and forcing all Australians, whether gay or straight, to move to the back of the bus.
