The Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing has indicated that 77% of young people in Australia who have experienced a mental illness for one year or longer, fail to access any type of health service . A significant factor that deters young people from accessing support is stigma.

The evidence based peer-to-peer model of stigma reduction and preventative education called in vivo has been revealed to be best practice in creating the greatest attitudinal and behavioural change surrounding mental health. Engaging in ‘direct personal contact’ with individuals who have a lived experience with mental ill health has been demonstrated to be the most significant way of accomplishing this .

Batyr’s innovative programs aim to engage, educate and empower young people through school, tertiary and community environments to reduce stigma and to increase help seeking behaviour of young people. The foundation of Batyr’s programs has been established on the strategic principles established by Patrick Corrigan to implement best practice in accomplishing this. A fundamental component of these programs is the comprehensive support framework Batyr has developed to train young people in building the skills and confidence to share their story of a lived experience with mental ill health and their journey seeking help. Through Batyr’s training program, speakers are equipped to share their stories with family, friends and the wider community in a safe manner to start positive conversations on mental health and to ultimately reduce stigma.

The CEO of Batyr Australia Limited, Sam Refshauge, will conduct the workshop to demonstrate the way this youth led movement has developed and implemented evidence based programs that are centred on in vivo. The development and implementation of Batyr’s interactive preventative education programs in schools and tertiary environments involve trained speakers that share their stories to empower other young people to seek help and to offer hope to those suffering in silence.

The workshop will translate this practice into reality by providing delegates with an opportunity to participate in a Batyr program. This will be accomplished through having delegates step into the shoes of young Australians to experience activities that provide insight into how Batyr smashes the stigma surrounding mental health in schools and tertiary institutions around Australia. A key element of the workshop will be hearing from a trained Batyr speaker share their lived experience of mental ill health and their journey seeking help. Delegates will be guided through activities and exercises to engage the audience with the workshop’s content. The workshop will conclude with a Q&A opportunity with Batyr’s CEO and the trained Batyr speaker to answer questions that have risen through participation in the workshop and to illicit an insightful discussion on stigma reduction and the empowerment of young people to seek help.

To date, Batyr has trained over 100 speakers and has reached more than 18,000 young people through school and tertiary programs. The impact of Batyr’s innovative model has displayed hopeful findings, with internal research indicating that after participating in a Batyr program, 72% of young people felt more comfortable discussing mental health issues and would be more likely to seek help compared to the national average help-seeking rate of 20-25% .

Many Australian states and various countries around the world are in the process of amending their Mental Health Acts to comply with the human rights approach adopted by United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). While legislative framework may form the basis of reform, what is required is a wider cultural change and acknowledgement of human rights of people with mental disabilities, not only by health professionals but also by the society at large.

Therefore, it is crucial for mental health service providers as well as other stakeholders to be well versed with the contemporary human rights discourse, which may form the royal road to mental health advocacy.

This paper will highlight the controversies, challenges and opportunities for human rights based mental health care and generate debate on sensitive issues e.g. right to autonomy versus right to treatment, economic implications of human rights approach to mental health care, risk versus capacity based legislation and medical model versus social model.

The relationship between mental health issues and legal problems can be a cyclic one. A person with a mental illness may experience legal problems related to issues such as debt, tenancy, fines and family law. These legal problems may go unaddressed because of more immediate needs related to mental health, which are themselves exacerbated by the escalating legal issues. The Medical Legal Partnerships (MLP) model is one which is in its infancy in Australia. The model has been operating successfully in the USA since the early 1990s and it has focussed on the placement of legal professionals in generic health services to enable the early identification and address of legal problems for people who might not otherwise seek legal help. This paper discusses an action research project currently underway in regional Victoria that is exploring the application of the MLP model specifically to the mental health context. Empirical evidence will be drawn upon to demonstrate how the MLP model can be applied to the mental health context and the paper will deliver early findings into the success of integrated services, as well as discussing the project’s early outcomes in terms of integrated service delivery, cross-sector professional development, and collaborative advocacy.

REFERENCES: 1. Richard Coverdale, Director, Centre for Rural and Regional Law and Justice (richard.coverdale@deakin.edu.au) 2. Ian Parsons, Research Fellow Centre for Rural and Regional Law and Justice (ian.parsons@deakin.edu.au)

Learning objective (1): People will take away an understanding of how MLPs operate, how to establish an MLP in their region and the benefits and challenges with building an MLP from the ground up.
Learning objective (2) answers the question: Our MLP was directly applied in the mental health context and not the holistic health context. It will provide an insight into how legal services in a co-sharing arrangement, are able to support individuals with mental health concerns.

Parents often encounter stigma in their community, such as blame for their child’s problem and criticism regarding the quality of their parenting (Moses, 2010). Many parents identify with, and internalise, these stigmatic experiences as self-stigma (Corrigan & Miller, 2004). Self-stigma may take the form of self-blame, self-deprecation, shame, and status loss. Given these negative effects, the aim of this study was to understand how parents cope with stigma and self-stigma. To do this, we conducted 12 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups with parents of children (aged 4-13) diagnosed with emotional and behavioural problems. Data was analysed using a descriptive phenomenological approach. We found that parents coped with stigma and self-stigma in many ways, including: seeking support from empathic others, engaging in self-directed social isolation, becoming hypervigilant to stigma, correcting others, and advocating for the child. All parents reported that protecting the child from stigma was a priority over and above any desire to protect the self. In sum, our results suggest that parents cope with stigma in different ways, some more adaptive than others. These results will be discussed alongside suggestions for helping parents to engage in more adaptive stigma and self-stigma coping strategies.