11

MIND THE GAP

Sometimes I worry that my anxiety is making my cat anxious. His resting face is a mask of alarmed alertness. It’s the exact same expression my brain would wear if it had a face. Dilated pupils as large and glassy as marbles, ears forever pricked up to anticipate the impending apocalypse, Hamish is a wreck. If the animal behaviourists are right and pets can pick up on their owners’ moods, I have a lot to answer for. He is restless and fragile and jumps at the slightest noise. When I go to the bathroom, he looks at me as if I’ve just dumped him in a cardboard box by the side of the road. He simply will not countenance a closed door. Once, he hissed at the air-conditioning condenser on my balcony, staring intently at its invisible internal demons for so long I was convinced I would require an exorcist. I described his behaviour to the vet, and she asked gently if there was ‘any stress in the home environment?’

‘Not really,’ I lied, omitting to mention all the times Hamish has quizzically sniffed my limp body as I lie in the foetal position, wailing into the hallway carpet. She suggested I buy a Feliway diffuser — a wall-mounted air freshener that, instead of releasing pleasant aromas from the Everglades, emits synthesised feline pheromones into the atmosphere to stop my domestic short-hair moggy from clawing my lounge suite to shreds and yowling at the split-system. She also sent me home with a packet of cat Valium, which I later discovered is just human Valium with a paw print on the box — a fact that would come in handy for those times when I needed to calm down quickly and couldn’t get to the pharmacy until the morning. You can’t truly call yourself a crazy cat lady until you’ve necked your psychologically disturbed cat’s anti-anxiety medication in a fit of panic.

Maybe it’s not my fault he’s mad. Perhaps it’s just that the universe has naturally paired two troubled souls. I picked him out from a pet rescue adoption website where you flick through cat profiles the way you might look for a partner online, and there was something about those searching green eyes that spoke to my heart. Like most cats, he is aloof, demands affection only on his terms, and can often be a complete arsehole. But there have been times when this eccentric bag of fur has been my anchor. There is something innately calming about his presence when he’s resting. If my brain is racing, I breathe deeply and just observe the rusted tip of his nose; the signature tabby v-shape on his forehead; his gentle vulnerability as he sleeps, wedged between my legs in a cocoon of his own making. I find myself mesmerised by the way he spends an inordinate amount of his day cleaning himself, even though he’s an indoor cat and not even remotely dirty. It’s meditative to observe the care he takes making sure no patch of fur goes unlicked. The way he pays particular attention to his paws, splaying his claws wide as he gnaws deep into the bone, chewing each nail vigorously with a num num num, always makes me chuckle.

And there are moments where he has given me the strength to keep breathing. On one particularly awful carpet-dwelling evening I was curled up in a ball, listening to Tracy Chapman, and dreaming of escape. My tears merged into a primal groan that came from another place. It was one of those evenings where my insides were cramped with a knot of pain that stretched far beyond the current moment. I was grieving for the parts of me I’d lost, the parts of me I might never find again. In the midst of my anguish, there he was, lying down next to me, mirroring my pose. I swear he was trying to spoon me. Burrowing into my back, he butted his head against me again and again. It was as if he was saying, You can do this. You will survive this. In that moment, I felt hopeful. Awake to the possibility of life.

These times with Hamish are about as close as I have come to mastering the art of mindfulness. I have all the books on the topic, and I wholeheartedly agree with the concept that living in the moment is the key to a calmer existence. Mindfulness is the act of quietening the mind by staying in the present, paying careful attention to the sights, sounds, and sensations around you. It’s a simple yet effective concept, when it works. But putting it into practice has proved more of a challenge. Anxiety, by its very nature, is the act of projecting into the future or fixating on the past. I am constantly scanning the horizon for the crest of the tsunami about to hit me, or gazing into the rear-view mirror at the reflection of my mistakes. After a lot of hard work and repetition, I have retrained my brain not to believe the worst-case scenarios. But my mind still wanders. Actually, it’s more like it straps on hiking boots and sets off to circumnavigate the globe. Trying to tame it has often left me frustrated. Why can’t I be like all those lithe, ponytailed goddesses in activewear on Instagram, mindfully dispersing their troubles with their obediently quiet brains? Being mindful shouldn’t be that hard. You’re just sitting still, being aware of your surroundings, focusing on the body and the breath. It’s basically just being alive. And I suck at it.

In an attempt to change this, I decided to join the millions of people around the world who have hopped on board the adult-colouring craze. It’s proved so popular that the world’s biggest pencil manufacturer, Faber-Castell, had to put on extra shifts in its Bavarian factory to keep up with demand. I bought the bestselling The Mindfulness Colouring Book, which told me that one of the best ways to soothe anxiety and eliminate stress was to work with your hands. Take a few minutes out of your day, wherever you are, and colour your way to peace and calm, the blurb read. I coloured religiously for days and waited for the peace I’d been promised. But all I ended up with was a sore hand and Regina screaming in my head, ‘You can’t even colour right, you fucking crazy woman!’

It’s not surprising I felt like a failure. If you listen to the hype on mindfulness, you’d think it was the panacea for the troubles of our time. Just stare at the intricate grooves of a raisin for ten minutes, eat a square of chocolate one millimetre at a time, or wash the dishes with an observant mind, and you’ll be on the fast track to emotional clarity. We have mindful workplaces, mindful schools, mindful eating, mindful parenting, mindful healthcare, and even mindful military action, where army troops are being trained in meditation exercises to help prepare them for combat. I’m not quite sure this is what Buddha had in mind when he first came up with the practice as a path to enlightenment.

There is solid research to show that mindfulness can have a positive effect on mental health. The UK’s National Health Service funds mindfulness sessions as an alternative to medication for some patients, and there is evidence it may be as effective as a treatment for recurrent depression. But its reputation as a cure-all for life’s challenges has been overplayed. Everywhere I look — in bookshops, in podcast charts, on the app store, and in online advertising — I’m promised that mindfulness will set me free. Maybe it will, in time. But it requires continued hard work and commitment to tame the mind, a muscle that needs to be flexed regularly. Once again, we are being sold a quick fix for our emotional and spiritual malnourishment. Happiness can be yours for the price of a 99c mindfulness meditation app.

While mindfulness has its roots in Buddhist traditions, American scientist and author Jon Kabat-Zinn is widely credited with bringing the practice into the mainstream through the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic he founded in 1979, followed by a series of bestselling books that helped people learn the technique in their own homes. A number of these books sit on the shelves in my apartment. They have titles like Full Catastrophe Living — which sounds like my autobiography — and Wherever You Go There You Are, which is all about ‘using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain and illness’. I have found some of the readings helpful. But non-judgementally staying in the present is no small feat for someone prone to catastrophic thinking and who has an inner monologue that sounds like a caffeine-frenzied sports commentator calling a horserace. On some days, with all the will in the world, I am unable to find stillness.

I am gradually getting better at it. I’ve found mindful breathing exercises and guided meditations to be calming, when used regularly. The effect is cumulative, so dedicated practice produces the best results. But diligence is a virtue I possess only in radical spurts. It’s hard to be fully present when you’re down the social-media rabbit hole; mindfulness only works when I take my head out of my phone. I’ve found that I am at my most still when there are no distractions. In the shower, I have learned to mindfully observe the warmth of the water, enjoying each drop hitting my skin and treating it as an indulgent experience rather than as a daily chore.

I’ve also gained a lot from the writings and audiobooks of modern-day Buddhist teachers such as Pema Chödrön and Tara Brach, who have helped me learn to embrace whatever I’m experiencing — good or bad. Observing the full depth of any given moment can make the happy times more fulfilling and the difficult times easier to bear. When I practise mindfulness meditation consistently, it does make a difference to my levels of anxiety. My brain might still be racing, but I’m able to witness the procession of negative thoughts as if I were a bystander watching a passing circus parade: I can take in all the rich colour and detail, but I don’t get involved. My experience does not define me.

Yet ultimately, while mindfulness may help me slow down and alleviate some of the more debilitating symptoms of anxiety, it will not ‘cure’ it. I will have to continue to address the underlying emotional drivers of my distress if I want to live a calmer, more meaningful life. The same can be said of our culture’s sickness. There are no shortcuts. Critics argue the Western corporatisation of Buddhist mindfulness practice has led to a ‘McMindfulness’ approach to mental suffering that commodifies ‘wellness’ while ignoring the underlying societal issues causing so much of our stress.

Writing in The New York Times, Ruth Whippman, author of America the Anxious: how our pursuit of happiness is creating a nation of nervous wrecks, argues that mindfulness is the new ‘think positive’ movement, with a focus on self-improvement that blames unhappiness on the individual’s inability to live in the moment rather than societal disadvantage. ‘The problem is not your sky-high rent or meagre paycheck, your cheating spouse or unfair boss or teetering pile of dirty dishes. The problem is you,’ she writes. Giving disadvantaged schoolchildren mindfulness classes rather than tackling education inequality, or teaching office workers mindful breathing instead of offering better conditions, is part of a systemic culture of overwork, Whippmann claims. Ideally, we’d do both. But that’s not what’s happening.

In 2014, an analysis by accounting firm Pricewaterhouse-Coopers estimated that undiagnosed mental-health problems were costing Australian businesses up to $11 billion a year in absenteeism, compensation claims, and lost productivity. Many companies are responding by giving employees ‘wellbeing’ leave or offering mindfulness courses. ANZ, Wesfarmers, and Bupa are among the organisations providing colouring books for their workers as a way to declutter their minds. But wouldn’t it be more effective to actually declutter their lives?

I have 2,301 unread emails in my inbox. I try to get through them — respond to the ones that matter, cull the ones that don’t — but there’s always more. A journalist friend told me recently that he spent his summer holiday deleting 200 emails a day just to avoid an overwhelming backlog when he returned to work. In November 2016, to promote national Go Home On Time Day, The Australia Institute released a study which found that the average full-time worker does 5.1 hours of unpaid overtime each week — or 264 hours per year. More than half of those with access to annual leave don’t take their full entitlements. ‘Live to work’ has become a national state of mind.

Similarly, a survey carried out by Microsoft in the United Kingdom found that almost 60 per cent of respondents thought about work as soon as they woke up in the morning. Forty-five per cent felt obliged to respond to a work email instantly, no matter where they were or what they were doing. This cult of busyness is unlikely to be fixed by token ‘wellbeing’ days, while businesses continue to flog their staff to death for the rest of the year.

Writing in The Conversation, psychotherapist Zoë Krupka said that the booming ‘stress reduction industry’ was a bandaid for a deeper problem — many of us simply work too much to be well. ‘Nothing can alleviate the stress of overwork except working less. Like the road signs say, only sleep cures fatigue … For the madly overworked, we need reminding that the only cure for working too much is to stop.’ Krupka said the wellness industry and corporate stress-management programs traded on a culture of overwork and that the answer had to be political, not personal.

In France, the government has tried to restore some semblance of work–life balance with legislation that came in on 1 January 2017, requiring companies to provide their staff with a ‘right to disconnect’ from technology outside working hours. Organisations with more than 50 staff must negotiate deals with their employees, setting out their rights not to reply to emails or take phone calls during their personal time. It could be tricky to enforce, but at least it sets a clear message about the kind of society citizens should be entitled to live in. If we don’t shift our mindset from this ‘always on’ culture, we’re setting up the next generation — already over-burdened with stress before they even reach the workforce — for a lifetime of unnecessary pressure and mental exhaustion. And if parents are so distracted by overflowing inboxes and excessive workloads, what does that do to their levels of distraction in those critical early years of a child’s life, when bonding is so important to brain development?

One of my childhood friends, Lisa, who I grew up with in Edinburgh, shared her own experiences of feeling overwhelmed by the demands of the modern age. A primary-school principal, she’d been chatting with an older teacher who said she felt the pressures today were far greater than when she first started working and raising a family. The conversation made Lisa, a working mother of three, reflect on just how hectic her life had become. She shared her daily schedule, and it floored me:

I say to my teachers all the time to switch off and take time with family but I don’t do it myself. I start at 7.30am (actually I start at 6.00 in the house before I even get out of bed) then I work until 5.30–6pm at school on a good day, sometimes up to 9pm if we have something on. I don’t get a lunch or tea break because I’m on duty all day long.

I go home, open the door, collect a child/children and take them to whichever club/activity/school thing or work that they are going to and I work whilst I wait for them to finish. I get home late evening, make dinner, do housework, help with homework then when they go to bed after 10 I prepare my own bag/get lunches ready for next day and sit down around 11pm for the first time to do my work emails. I go to bed around 1am then start all over again.

She loved her life, but had recently realised it was out of balance and entirely unsustainable. There was no time to exercise, socialise, relax, or often even go to the toilet on an average day. The pattern was being repeated with her children, where they were on a treadmill of school, study, and work with no downtime. ‘We have created a society of young to middle-aged adults who work with no balance. We are all heading for complete mental and physical burnout,’ she wrote.

When did life get so hectic? We used to say ‘good, thanks’ when someone asked how we were. Now, the standard response is ‘crazy busy’. I saw a meme recently that said, ‘Adulthood is emailing “Sorry for the delayed response!” back and forth until one of you dies.’ Racing towards burnout shouldn’t be a competitive sport, but exhaustion has become a badge of honour. A commentator I follow on Instagram recently posted a picture at 1.30 am of a screenshot of her alarm, which was set for 3.00 am, with the hashtag #90minutessleep.

It used to be that the more money you earned, the less you worked. Leisure time was a marker of wealth. Now, the opposite is true. A Columbia Business School, Georgetown University, and Harvard Business School study found that in America, a busy person was seen by others as possessing ‘desired human capital characteristics (competence and ambition) and is scarce and in demand on the job market’. Essentially, the busier the person, the higher up the social ladder they must be. Conversely, in Europe, where many shops are closed at the weekends, workers have more legally protected paid holidays, and leisure time is prioritised, a higher social status was bestowed upon those who worked less.

In Australia, I suspect we’d find similar results to those in the States. Social-media feeds are filled with people humblebragging about their demanding schedules and hectic social commitments. It often makes me wonder if by ‘crazy busy’ they actually mean ‘completely overwhelmed and heading for a nervous breakdown’.

This race to oblivion is yet another footnote in the same old script. Happiness will come once we reach the finish line. That promotion, that pay rise, that pat on the back from our boss. But really, we’re just pounding the treadmill and going nowhere. In therapy with Veronica, she pointed out that when we’re pushing ourselves to extremes — whether in our professional or personal lives — it’s worth examining what’s driving that need to please. What validation are we seeking from making ourselves indispensable? What void are we trying to fill? If you truly believe the world will crumble if you don’t send that midnight email or take that work phone call during a family reunion, perhaps it’s time to pause and ask what really lies beneath.

In German, the word Stark means strong. I didn’t know this until Jason started dating a beautiful, soulful man from Hamburg called Marco, who told me he believed I was the living embodiment of my name. It was a nice change from the ‘Winter is coming’ jokes that I usually got when people heard my surname. The Game of Thrones references had become so common I decided to wear my name with pride and bought myself a bright blue hoodie with the words I CAN’T KEEP CALM I’M A STARK printed on the front.

By the time I met Marco, the joke had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’d reached a point where I was fantasising about the peace death would bring. My brain was so heavy with ceaseless, catastrophic thoughts I wanted to wring it out like a sodden sponge. The longer I was off work, the more I worried I’d never go back, and the more defective I felt. Round and round the anxiety hamster wheel spun. I was scared every second I was awake. It was like I was balancing with one foot on a landmine; one false step could see me blown to smithereens. If I managed one meal a day I was doing well. Sleep came an hour or so at a time, and only with the help of tranquilisers. I developed an angry, full-body rash that clung to me for weeks. When I looked in the mirror, my brokenness stared back at me and I wept.

On the way back from the doctor one day, I found myself standing at the pedestrian lights, watching cars speed past, drawn to the intoxicating freedom that would come from taking one simple step into the traffic. That month, I drafted suicide notes and then ripped them up in despair when I realised my hell could not be escaped by passing it on to those I loved. I looked for solace in this small concession. Despite the pain, I at least had the lucidity to know the people closest to me would not necessarily be better off without me. But that knowledge was its own prison. I felt trapped by this thing, this beast. It brought an endless grief as I mourned for my disappearing self and the lost concept of hope.

My friends stepped in, taking responsibility for a life I no longer recognised or wanted. One morning, after I’d swallowed just enough Valium to turn me into a zombie but not quite enough to kill me, Chris let himself into my apartment and found me there in bed, the blinds on every window closed. Lying down next to me, he stroked my hair as I cried. He gently urged me to get up and opened the blinds, presenting me with a toasted sandwich and a bottle of Gatorade — his go-to morning-after cure, which he hoped might have a similar effect on my Val-over. Wrapping me in a blanket on the couch, he turned on the television and I stared at it blankly. We watched Teen Wolf and through my fog, I remember thinking how odd it was that a werewolf was playing high-school basketball and nobody found this peculiar.

Chris messaged Nonie and she left work, bringing her laptop to my place. She worked at the kitchen table as I lay on the couch under a doona, crying and sleeping and crying and sleeping. Later, my friends fed Hamish and stood in my kitchen, speaking in whispers as I sought counsel on the phone from Veronica. Then they drove me to the doctor and waited as Dr Fiona called Veronica and they discussed the next steps. Knocking myself out with Valium was not a sustainable plan. My family were on the other side of the world and my friends couldn’t keep putting their lives on hold to watch over me. Fiona suggested hospitalisation as an option. But I was scared. I thought back to my teens and that locked ward with the screaming behind metal doors. I didn’t want to go. Not yet.

Nonie brought me home and asked me what I could manage to eat, but decisions were beyond me. She went out and came back with tacos, quietly laying the food out, coaxing me to eat, as if I were a scared animal. I took a few bites and we sat under doonas, watching Jimmy Fallon’s Lip Synch Battle. When she left, Jason tag-teamed, having jumped in the car and driven across the city in his pyjamas. Standing in my hallway, he held me, and I remember thinking if he let go I might die, shattering into a thousand pieces right there on the carpet. We got into bed and he wrapped his arms around my waist and told me I was safe. I was not alone.

The next day, Chris picked me up and took me for a drive. I was disconnected, staring through the windscreen at a world that was muted and out of focus. He talked, telling me silly stories about people we knew as he drove me around, destination nowhere. We stopped at a hipster burger bar and I lay my head on his shoulder as we shared a vanilla milkshake with two straws. Back in the car, Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ came on the radio and I cried as I wondered if I’d ever again be able to laugh at irony.

In those difficult days, weeks, and months, my loved ones held me up. Not just Chris, Nonie, and Jason, but so many loving, compassionate friends and colleagues who visited, walked with me, held my hand, or just sat patiently while I cried. It was a village of helpers, and I’m grateful to every single one of them. There were times when I was so depleted, the strength of their love pushed me through moments that felt infinitely hopeless. Family sent cards and letters from different parts of the world. Flowers from my brother and his girls appeared on the doorstep. Food parcels and care packages were brought round with hugs. I couldn’t see a path to the future but when Nonie sat on my couch, her voice breaking as she imagined a world without me in it, the heartbroken look in her eye made me promise to hold on.

I was also lucky to have an incredibly empathetic editor at The Age, Duska Sulicich, who backed me all the way and persuaded management to keep paying me throughout my absence. I was so grateful for that gesture of faith. It eased the pressure and allowed me the space to recover my strength and do the emotionally gruelling work in therapy. She kept in touch with Fiona and Veronica, and together we formulated a plan to get me back to work gradually, building up my days over a period of months until I was able to return full-time.

But not everyone has this experience. A 2013 study of 1,000 Australian workers found that four out of ten people who take sick leave for depression hide it from their employer, with almost half fearing they would lose their job if they revealed their illness. I suspect that figure would be even higher for more stigmatised conditions such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

While workplace mindfulness programs and yoga classes might provide organisations with a cheap way to be seen to be doing something about the overwhelming demands on employees, they also obscure the structural problems that make it so difficult for people to speak up when they are struggling to cope.

Around the time I was making tentative steps back into the newsroom after nearly five months off work, beyondblue CEO Georgie Harman hit the headlines when she stated publicly that employees who disclose mental-health problems are risking their careers. She said she couldn’t in good conscience encourage full and open disclosure because discrimination remained rife in many industries. Her advice was simple: ‘Don’t, because you might not get that promotion, you might get the sack, there might be repercussions.’

It was an extraordinary statement from the head of a mental-health organisation that has been an awareness-raising juggernaut, searing the prevalence of depression into the national consciousness. For 17 years, beyondblue, founded by former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, had been urging people to speak up and get help; now here was its CEO saying, actually, don’t, it’s too risky. It was the same advice I was given just a few months later, when I was asked to appear on a panel discussing mental health in my capacity as a journalist who had covered the issue for many years. Prior to the event, I confessed to a contact who heads up a major mental-health organisation that I was considering disclosing my own struggles with anxiety. The advice was brutally honest: ‘Don’t. It might be used against you. I wish it wasn’t true, but you will be judged.’

It made me realise how fortunate I’d been to keep my job. When I spoke to Harman some months later, she agreed that this was a sad reality and stood by her previous comments:

As a society we are at that really interesting point of social change where organisations like beyondblue have been banging the drum and encouraging people to talk about it [mental illness] and educate themselves and come out and be open and seek help and at the same time we haven’t quite got the structures, the systems or the case law. We haven’t got the kind of markers as a society that say, ‘If you do this, it will be okay, you’ll be protected.’

The culture has shifted in as much as we’re having conversations about mental health we’ve never had before, and for that I’m grateful. My teenage self would have been spared a lot of angst had I known other people faced similar problems. But Harman’s comments serve as a stark reminder that we have a long way to go. Raised awareness can only be considered a success if that awareness translates into meaningful change.

It’s become almost fashionable to show support for people with mental-health problems. Wear a wristband for depression. Start a hashtag for suicide prevention. Get a beaming celebrity to post an Instagram endorsement of your fun run for anxiety. But when services are stretched beyond capacity, cheap slacktivism is not enough. I don’t want to read another passive-aggressive, copy-and-paste (MUST COPY, NO SHARING!) suicide awareness post on Facebook. Soulless and manipulative, they’re little more than modern-day chain letters. There’s always the kicker: I know 99% of you won’t share, but if even one of you does it will make a difference to people in need. Subtext: you can join me up here on the moral high ground or you can be a heartless monster who wants to see people die. Your choice.

One I saw recently read:

Many people think that a suicide attempt is a selfish move because the person just does not care about the people left behind. I can tell you that when a person gets to that point, they truly believe that their loved ones will be much better off with them gone. This is mental illness not selfishness. TRUTH: Depression is a terrible disease and seems relentless. A lot of us have been close to that edge, or dealt with family members in a crisis, and some have lost friends and loved ones. Let’s look out for each other and stop sweeping mental illness under the rug.

It went on at some length before imploring people to cut and paste the status for one hour to give a moment of support for people who were struggling. One hour. One whole hour of allowing a paragraph written by a stranger to occupy your tiny corner of cyberspace. In your face, suicide! Cop that, depression! I’m sure it’s well-intentioned and maybe it even gives some comfort to those who have lost loved ones to suicide, but when I was struggling it just made me angry. People living with mental illness or emotional distress need more than hashtags, wristbands, and platitudes. They need supportive workplaces, well-trained GPs, investment in research, and a system that doesn’t cast them adrift if they don’t recover in the socially accepted timeframe. More often than not, they need cold hard cash.

My psychologist costs almost $200 a session. Some cost even more. With the Medicare rebate, I get $125 back each time. When things were really bad, I was seeing Veronica twice a week just to survive. I tore through my ten Medicare-subsidised sessions in five weeks. After that, I had to raise almost $400 every week — more than $1,700 per calendar month — to pay for treatment. Finding Dr Fiona was a welcome relief from the quick-turnaround GPs I’d had in the past, but it came at a cost. Her extended consultations were billed at $250 a session, and the out-of-pocket gap I had to cover was substantial. When she referred me to a psychiatrist for a medication review, it cost a staggering $430 for a 45-minute consultation. My private health insurance gave me $300 a year in psychological services, which covered fewer than two sessions with Veronica. And when Dr Fiona suggested the possibility of a short-term hospital stay, I was shocked to discover that despite being covered for inpatient care for a range of physical health problems, there was no cover for psychiatric admissions. I could no more separate my mind from my body than I could grow a third arm, but as far as the system was concerned, they were completely different entities. More than half of all health insurance policies don’t provide adequate cover for a stay in a private psychiatric hospital.

In a landmark 2015 case, 21-year-old University of Melbourne student Ella Ingram won a David and Goliath battle against industry giant QBE when the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal awarded her $20,000 after ruling the company had breached the Equal Opportunity Act by denying her travel-insurance claim. She’d taken out the cover as a Year 12 student before a school trip to New York. But soon after she became depressed and suicidal, requiring hospital treatment for a fortnight. Her doctor advised her to cancel the trip while she recovered. QBE refused to pay her cancellation costs, despite her condition developing after she had taken out the cover. Taking them to court was a huge gamble that nobody before had taken and won.

When things were really rough for me, I managed to stay out of hospital by being lucky enough to have a generous support network and continuing with weekly intensive therapy. But as it cost a small fortune, I dipped into my savings and Dad stepped in to help. He drew down on his mortgage and sent me money so I could pay for sessions with Veronica in advance. Without his assistance I honestly don’t think I’d be alive. Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering what will happen if I find myself back in a place of despair. I never for a moment forget how fortunate I was to be in the position of having financial support. I think of people who are unemployed, on minimum wage, from vulnerable communities with families to feed. How do they keep going? Often they can’t. It’s impossible to ignore the very clear link between mental illness and poverty. Disadvantage, income inequality, and a lack of emotional support and connection to community are major drivers of mental ill health. And if people can’t afford to be sick, it’s not surprising they deteriorate. A mindfulness colouring book and corporate ‘well washing’ programs are no substitute for proper investment in treatment or the social structures that provide a protective barrier from psychological problems. People need the right help at the right time. If it’s not there, things can go wrong very quickly. Martin Vo’s family can attest to that.

Of course, we should keep working to reduce stigma and have open and frank discussions about mental health, but awareness-raising is not enough. We desperately need more money for treatment and scientific research. There is still so much we don’t know about the brain and the intricately complex realm of emotional health. The treatment options available are not as advanced or evidence-based as in other areas of healthcare. I know none of this is easy. But surely we can do better? Surely we can do more than update our status on Facebook? We need our leaders to stop paying lip service to change and take real action. When we ask ‘R U OK?’ there needs to be somewhere to go when the answer is no. The chances of surviving our emotional pain should not be determined by the balance of our bank accounts.