There is growing recognition that the promotion of mental health and wellbeing and the prevention of mental ill-health must be a key priority across government mental health policies and funding. The Everymind Prevention First Framework identifies eight key action areas spanning primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention, and mental health promotion. This review seeks to understand how and to what extent primary prevention and mental health promotion is represented in current government-endorsed mental health policies in Australia.
This review identified 19 current government owned or endorsed mental health policies that met inclusion criteria. Twelve policies were for the whole community at either a state, territory or national level, and seven were written for a particular population. Two coders used the Prevention First Framework to perform a content analysis and code all actions noted within each policy.
The findings highlight significant inconsistencies across jurisdictions in both the existence and content of mental health policies. Only one state had both a standalone mental health strategy and a supporting implementation plan, with other jurisdictions using a mix of strategies, promotion and prevention plans, or implementation plans. Three states had no current overarching mental health strategy in place at the time of analysis
The review found that state, territory and national policies include a greater focus on treatment and support (62%) than primary prevention (15%), whereas policies that focus on particular population groups had a greater focus on primary prevention (23%) and mental health promotion (32%) than broader population-based policies.
This paper will report on key insights from the policy review, trends across different types of policies and emerging opportunities for advocacy and influence.

CONTEXT AND AIM
Most of us know what to do to stay physically healthy — eat well, move often, get enough sleep. But when it comes to mental health, the everyday actions that help aren’t always clear. Our research set out to answer two simple but important questions:
1. What daily actions make the biggest difference to our mental health?
2. How often should we be doing them?

METHODS AND ANALYSIS
The Big 5 Framework is based on research involving over 25,000 adults. Through large-scale surveys, we identified five key actions — out of 16 possibilities — that were most strongly linked to lower symptoms of depression and anxiety, and higher life satisfaction.

Longitudinal studies showed that the more often people did these five actions, the better their mental health. Experimental studies revealed that gentle nudges, like SMS reminders, helped people do these actions more often — leading to real improvements in wellbeing.

Importantly, when people were asked to stop doing these actions, their mental health declined quickly — but improved again once they resumed them.


OUTCOMES
The Big 5 Framework is now being used by Health Direct, several Australian NGOs, and in clinical trials across more than 10 countries. It’s also been implemented at MindSpot, an Australian digital psychology service.

At this conference, we’ll share new findings from MindSpot showing how promoting the Big 5 not only improves mental health outcomes, but also helps people understand what they can do each day to support their own wellbeing.

FUTURE ACTIONS
The Big 5 Framework is simple, low-cost, and scalable — making it ideal for national education campaigns. We believe it’s time to promote a clear message: there are things we can do every day to support our mental health, and when we stop doing them, our wellbeing can suffer.

Introduction: Calls to address mental illness and poor mental health have recognised that various social, economic, and environmental factors shape mental health over the life course. Neighbourhood social fragmentation, characterised by dimensions of attachment to neighbourhood, transience and sharing of norms and values has been linked with suicide, psychological distress, depression, and self-rated mental health. The purpose of this study was to examine for the first time, the longitudinal effect of neighbourhood social fragmentation on psychological distress among middle-aged Australian adults.
Methods: The Longitudinal - Australian Neighbourhood Social Fragmentation Index (L-ANSFI) was developed using census data and includes an interactive online tool for local exploration and visualisation. We examined change in psychological distress by neighbourhood social fragmentation over four time points between 2009 and 2016. Data were from HABITAT, a population-representative study of persons aged 40–65 in 2007 (baseline) residing in 200 neighbourhoods in Brisbane, Australia. The analytic sample comprised 2,902 men and 3,950 women who recorded scores on the validated Kessler 6 scale of non-specific psychological distress. Sex-specific longitudinal analyses used mixed effects regression models before and after adjustment for individual, household and neighbourhood level covariates.
Results: Men living in more socially fragmented neighbourhoods had higher mean scores of psychological distress. The effect of neighbourhood social fragmentation on psychological distress among men was stable over time. A trend of higher distress scores for women occurred as the level of neighbourhood social fragmentation increased, however this was found not to be statistically significant.
Conclusion: In the context of ageing populations and increasing mental healthcare costs, these findings suggest that neighbourhood social fragmentation is important for the development of targeted prevention strategies aimed at improving mental health and wellbeing via creating more cohesive communities.

Context and Aim
Mental health services in Victoria have historically been fragmented - Lived Experience voices sidelined, and collaboration between clinical and peer workforces limited. The Royal Commission into Victoria’s mental health system called for change and services that are compassionate, holistic, prevent mental ill health, promote wellbeing, and centre Lived Experience in leadership and decision making. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Local in Lilydale (the Local) was established as a key recommendation from the Royal Commission. The Local created a culture where Lived Experience, multidisciplinary clinicians and community engagement teams work together to strengthen prevention and mental health care across communities.
Methods and Analysis
Collaboration is embedded in Local practice. Lived Experience leads the participant journey, with clinical and community engagement staff as active partners. Reflective spaces and shared decision making empower individuals to lead their care, preventing dependence on tertiary services. Learning comes from stories of teams and community members, and observing how collaboration empowers and improves mental health and wellbeing outcomes.
Outcomes
The Local is breaking down divides, co-creating care that is more responsive, preventative and community focused. Participants show growth and increased hope for their future. Lived experience and clinical expertise working together have strengthened trust, shaped innovative approaches to mental health support, and shown that by centring participants as the drivers of their care, avoidance of hospital admissions is possible.
Future Actions
To sustain and grow our approach, we must continue to prioritise Lived Experience leadership, invest in workforce development and build partnerships across sectors. Our experience shows that when collaboration is genuine, prevention and promotion of mental health can become a reality.

We know that what surrounds us shapes us. Prioritising children’s health and wellbeing from conception is essential to ensuring a safe, flourishing and positive society, including intergenerationally. Achieving this requires that children, young people, parents, carers and communities are supported by systems and natural, built and digital environments that will enable them to thrive. We also know that not all are thriving, compounded by growing pressure on families, human services and the economy. It is crucial we adopt a systems approach to building individual and collective capacity and capability if we are to optimally promote and protect lifelong mental health and wellbeing.

Thriving Queensland Kids Partnership (TQKP) is an initiative of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. We are a systems coalition and broker working towards the vision that within one generation, every young Queenslander has what they need to thrive no matter their background or where they live.

Running through all TQKP’s initiatives is the thread of enhancing, enabling and embedding the capabilities required to optimise human development. TQKP has woven together wisdom from First Nations people, lived experience, practitioners, community and research to develop, disseminate and/or enact shared, neuro-informed knowledge, skills and language within and across the people, places, services and systems that promote positive health and learning outcomes for children and young people.

This presentation will explore how knowledge translation and innovation can connect existing resources and foster sustainable implementation strategies to enhance collective capacity and capability. We will share resources and insights from a number of TQKP initiatives, including our learnings regarding what helps and hinders sustainable system change.

Working together to adopt, embed, upscale and steward a systems approach grounded in wellbeing, resilience and healing will promote and protect the mental health and wellbeing of all Australians, now and into the future.

There is no doubt that mental health awareness and literacy efforts over the last few decades have helped to reduce stigma around high prevalence mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, promote help-seeking, and secure people’s access to support and services. However, there is now growing evidence that the current approach may have led to several unintended negative consequences including contributing to the pathologisation of common difficult emotions, the medicalisation of mental ill-health and over-diagnosis of mental health conditions – all related phenomena that have the potential to paradoxically undermine the quality of people’s mental health.

This presentation will explore three aspects of this issue. First, it will consider the broad drivers of our changing perceptions of poor mental health including concept creep, heightened vigilance and social contagion, systemic incentives, and commercial and pharmaceutical interests – and how efforts to improve mental health literacy may have contributed to some of these. Second, it will discuss the potential impacts on our mental health and wellbeing, including undermining people’s resilience, increasing self-stigma, obscuring the environmental causes of poor mental health, trivialising some mental health conditions, and misallocating resources. Third, it will explore how we can improve our approach to mental health promotion – particularly mental health literacy - by applying a more sophisticated mental health framework – the dual-continua model of mental health. Helping people in the community, as well as mental health promotion workers, develop a more nuanced understanding of mental health, particularly different states of poor mental health, should better support them to effectively manage its key influences, thereby helping them to experience their highest possible mental wellbeing throughout their lives.

Structural prevention: can alienation be reduced under capitalism?
Julia Anaf, Fran Baum, Connie Musolino, Miriam van den Berg, Toby Freeman, Jaye Louise Litherland-De Lara, Matt Fisher

Background: Alienation is part of Marx’s theory of class and describes the negative health impacts stemming from the ways production and consumption are organised. Some scholars interpret his theory to mean that unless the capitalist mode of production is changed alienation in society will not be reduced. Yet reducing alienation would be an important action to improve population mental health.

Methods: This paper will draw on four ongoing studies: 1) A narrative literature review on alienation’s impacts on health, 2) A self-completion survey of Gig workers’ health; 2) mixed methods study of how employment affects suicide; and 4) A review of the impact of privatisation on health and equity.

Findings: Our work on alienation (1) has been critiqued for assuming that alienation could be reduced under capitalism (2). Our narrative literature review highlights the ways public health researchers have used the concept of alienation. Our research studies indicate that the extent and impacts of alienation do vary, are affected by consumption systems, privatisation, and working and employment conditions, and consequently alienation is amenable to policy interventions. Policy initiatives that the studies suggest might reduce the health impacts of alienation will be presented.

Conclusion: While we accept Marx’s thesis that capitalism inevitably produces alienation among all members of society, our research indicates that its health impacts can be alleviated or exacerbated through policy decisions and commercial forces. In concluding we will pose the question of what measures might reduce the alienation that people experience from processes of production and consumption that have such a strong adverse impact on their mental health.
References
1. Baum F, Anaf J, Freeman T, et al Twenty-first century alienation and health: a research agenda. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2025. DOI: 10.1136/jech-2024-223112
2. Muntaner, C et al Alienation: another contested Marxian construct in epidemiology and public health, J Epidemiol Community Health. 2025, Forthcoming