Mental Health Month

Dear Rotary Club of Altona City,

I often find myself thinking about what sits in the gap between a question and an answer.

It is possibility. Every breakthrough that has ever changed a life began its life in that gap, back when it was nothing more than an idea somebody chose to believe was worth the chance.

That is where Australian Rotary Health begins, and it is a space almost nobody else is willing to stand in.

We fund possibility.

We back the boldest idea, and the person brave enough to chase it, early. At exactly the point in a career when support is hardest to find, and long before anyone can promise where the answer will lead.

Larger funders need evidence and momentum before they can commit, and that evidence has to come from somewhere. We are that somewhere. Without us, some of the most courageous questions in Australian health would simply never get asked.

Every so often I get to stand at the far end of one of those decisions, and it is the best part of this job.

A question we funded in 2018 is now written into the national guideline that shapes how Australian midwives check on the mental health of pregnant women. It is being asked today, in rooms we will never stand in, here and on the other side of the world.

A question we funded nine months ago has a brilliant young researcher and everything still in front of her.

Both of those are possibility. One of them proven, one of them still being chased, and neither would exist if somebody had waited for certainty.

I cannot tell you which of the questions we back this year will change something. Nobody can, and that is precisely the point. What I can tell you is that not one of them gets its chance without a community bold enough to say yes first.

We are immensely proud of the science we make possible. We are prouder still of the people who fund it.

That is you.

Kindest,

Yvonne Keane AM

Chief Executive Officer, Australian Rotary Health

What 45 years has built

Years of saying yes		Raised and invested		Research grants and fellowships		Rural and Indigenous scholarships

Most women see a midwife long before they ever see anyone about their mental health. Which makes pregnancy one of the few stretches of adult life when somebody is reliably, gently, checking in on you.

The checking in was never the hard part. Knowing what to ask was.

So in 2018 we backed Associate Professor Nicole Reilly, then at the University of Newcastle, through our Geoffrey Betts Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her question sounds almost too simple. Could you ask a woman the right handful of questions early in her pregnancy, and know which of them were going to need support before anything had gone wrong?

She found that you could, and in doing so she changed the way women are supported through pregnancy and in the months after their baby arrives.

Her work is now known as the Antenatal Risk Questionnaire, and Australia's National Perinatal Mental Health Guideline lists it as the tool to use when a service assesses psychosocial risk in pregnancy. Asked as early as practical, and again six to twelve weeks after the birth. That is the national standard, and Rotarians funded the work that built and validated it.

Asking the right question early is not a step on the way to support. It is support. It is the moment a woman who would otherwise have gone unnoticed becomes a woman somebody is looking after. Where these programs run, referrals rise, women reach services, and they come through it better.

And then something even more wonderful happened, which nobody had planned for and nobody could have seen as possible.

The questionnaire has since been validated in Japanese and adapted in Turkish. A simple question asked in Newcastle, backed by Rotary clubs in Australia, is now supporting mothers not only here, but on the other side of the world.

None of that was in the plan in 2018. It happened because Rotarians backed a question long before anyone knew where it would lead.

A simple question asked in Newcastle is now supporting mothers on the other side of the world.

Flynn Vamos, Macquarie University

Not to simply cope with ADHD at school, but to belong there.

Flynn Vamos has three children with ADHD.

She also has ADHD herself, although she did not find that out until she was an adult. So she knows this from both sides of the kitchen table. She knows what a school day feels like when your brain works differently to everyone else's in the room, and she knows what it looks like when it is your own child walking back through the door at the end of one.

There is a great deal written about children with ADHD. Almost none of it is written for them.

Nothing that tells a nine year old, in their own language, how to get through a school day and still feel like they belong in the room.

In January, we said yes.

Flynn holds a General Health PhD Scholarship at Macquarie University, co-funded by The Hancock Family and supervised by Associate Professor Melanie Porter. Her PhD will produce what we believe is Australia's first co-created wellbeing guide for primary school children with ADHD.

Co-created, meaning those children are not the subject of the research. They are at the heart of it. Their lived experience is embedded in the core of the guide, and it will be written in their own words, because they are the ones who know what actually helps.

“The project will meaningfully improve the lives of children with ADHD by providing the first student-centred, evidence-based resource designed specifically for their needs.”

We are grateful to be supported by a community that decides questions like Flynn's are worth the chance.

That is where possibility begins, and it is where we begin too.

Mental health has always sat at the heart of what we fund. In 2023 we made a deliberate choice to sharpen that focus onto the mental health of children aged 0 to 12, because around half of all lifelong mental health difficulties begin before a child turns 14.

So the most important work has to happen earlier than it does now. Earlier understanding, earlier support, and better outcomes for the whole of someone's life.

That is the hardest place in the country to fund, because the answer arrives years after the money does. It is also where it goes furthest.

However you choose to help, you are doing one thing. You are unlocking possibility.

Two weeks out

Subscribers have had the full details of this night twice already, so this is not the details again. This is the last time we can ask.

Friday 16 October is the only evening in forty five years when the people who funded this work and the people who did it are in the same room. After this newsletter there is no other newsletter before the doors open.

If you have been meaning to book, this is the week.

And if you are coming, consider bringing seven people rather than none. Seats are $95 each, or a table of eight is $720, and it is the single easiest thing a club or a board can do for us this year.

Friday 16 October, 6.30pm. Rydges Parramatta. Black tie. $95 a seat, $720 a table of eight.

The same day as World Mental Health Day. Set a date. Wear a hat. Send us the photos. That is the whole thing. 100% of the money raised goes to mental health research. Register your Hat Day

All walks are $30, and 100% of the money raised goes to mental health research.

The health charity Rotary clubs and Rotarians power.

Australian Rotary Health
25/1 Maitland Place, Norwest NSW 2153
(02) 8837 1900  ·  news@arh.org.au
australianrotaryhealth.org.au

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