Ideas Worth Spreading

Ideas worth spreading is the motto of TED.com, the web site where the greatest thinkers on the planet strut their stuff! If you are a writer, and you don’t know about it, shame on you! Go there NOW! It’s like a candy store for writers whose very existence depends on the transmission of ideas.

The TED phenomenon started in the US, but has now extended all across the world with the advent of TEDx. This brand is an opportunity for locally produced TED experiences. It’s a brilliant concept because thinkers exist everywhere, not just in the US!

Australia has its fair share of thinkers and Canberra held its very first TEDx yesterday in the National Library. I went! I saw! I blogged!

There were so many great speakers there yesterday offering their ideas which are well worth spreading, so I am going to help do that job now.

But it will take several editions to do them justice.

This is the first of several offerings on the subject of Ideas Worth Spreading.

TEDx Canberra opened and closed with what is undeniably one of the most urgent issues in Australia today, suicide. It was a sobering, rather depressing reality thrust upon the attendees, but obviously well chosen as the most pressing issue of the day.

Dawn O’Neil AM, was first cab off the rank. As ex CEO of Lifeline since 2000, currently working with Beyond Blue, and with credentials that read like a novella, this woman must know what she is talking about.

Storytelling her way historically through tragedies where Aussie “mateship” was a social panacea for great physical tragedies, she retold the events that established response organisations, with which we are familiar today. Through the 1907 Bondi Beach collapse of a sandbar and a rescue effort which resulted in the formation of the Royal Life Saving Service as we know it today, the Maitland floods, which meant that we now have a national SES service, the 1974 Cyclone in Darwin from which the technology for new cyclone proof houses eventuated, to the Black Saturday tragedy, where an extraordinary community effort was made to alleviate the suffering and which added a silver lining of hope to the otherwise bleak and charred futures of the affected. These stories moved us and confirmed the notion of physical tragedies eliciting extraordinary community response and social cohesion.

But the point was made, that this is not the community response when non-physical tragedy strikes. A 2010 Senate enquiry on suicide revealed some damning stories of human suffering, where intervention has failed; where numerous lives have been lost due to the total absence of effective services to cope with the demand.

Dawn reiterated the statistics, which reveal that suicide is the leading cause of death in young men and women, double the number killed in road accidents!

Closing the TEDx event yesterday, we were privileged to have Professor Patrick McGorry address our Tedizens. He not only has put Australia at the forefront of innovation and in the prevention and treatment of mental illness, but was also deservedly named Australian of the Year in January.

Professor McGorry advised that we need the right approach at the right time, to get the right results.

His focus is on young people, because that is where the most urgent needs lie, but he advocates a “Mental First Aid” approach for all, community based. Just as we have already established in community health for physical ailments, this can be modelled on existing services.

He has already established “Headspace” clinics in Queensland’s Gold Coast, where there are “stigma free”, “youth friendly” GPs, counsellors, health workers, etc; a triage team to immediately deal with the urgent problems many of our youth are facing.

But not only does he envisage these services to deal with immediate issues, he is a long range thinker, who has also advocated a vocationally focused solution, where the young person is assisted in rejoining the community from which they have been isolated. Services to reintegrate them into education or the workforce and provide support for that to happen is a vital element of his plan.

McGorry spoke of Pace clinics, home based treatment, young people having an active role in the administration of their own solutions and vocational recovery.

Professor McGorry’s vision for the future is a large one. Mental health is a global problem, but Australia can be the innovator! We have heard from on high that this area of the health system is always the last to receive attention, yet it’s one of the leading problems in society today, globally.

Are we willing to accept living in a community which does not adequately address this crisis?

This is the Next Frontier and McGorry is leading the charge! #fb