Is headspace making a difference to young people’s lives?

3. Access and Engagement with Centres
introduction in a space they were comfortable:
[Our consortium partner] has a youth engagement officer that works out of [headspace] once
a week. We had to be really creative in that position, so what I’m using it for is if we have
young people who are not quite ready to come in yet, but want them to, then what we do is
we send the youth engagement officer out to that home to facilitate community work…like an
outreach service (Service Manager)
Finally, the capacity of headspace to provide services to young people in regional and remote areas
is boosted by eheadspace, which provides an online and telephone counselling service. eheadspace
operates as both an alternative to centre-based treatment, and a form of support that complements
the centre-based program. The degree of online and face-to-face service integration is evidenced
by the fact that almost one third of headspace clients that received services at a centre in the
2013/14 financial year also used eheadspace. The contribution of eheadspace to the headspace
service delivery model is elaborated in section 5.6. Evaluation data shows that eheadspace is highly
regarded by centre staff and facilitates service access for young people, including those living in
regional and remote areas:
I think eheadspace is a great initiative. I know it’s primarily meant to be for people who can’t
access centres, so more rural and remote. We still use it a lot as another contact point for a
young person to be able to engage if they need support (Clinical Team Leader)
3.6 How does headspace increase awareness of mental health literacy among young
people? To what extent have the number and type of young people accessing
mental health services changed?
Mental health literacy refers to the knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders that aid in their
recognition, management or prevention (Jorm et al, 1997). Mental health literacy includes four key
components:
• the ability to recognise specific disorders
• knowing how to seek mental health information
• knowledge of risk factors and causes, of self-treatments; and of professional help available,
and
• attitudes that promote recognition and appropriate help-seeking (Jorm et al, 1997).
Incomplete mental health literacy is a significant barrier to service use among young people (Wilson
el al, 2011) and consequently headspace works to increase community awareness of mental health
issues, increase knowledge, and encourage help seeking. During interviews, staff identified two
strategies employed to increase awareness of mental health literacy: community engagement and
national branding activities.
Community engagement is an integral part of the headspace service model. Each headspace centre
employs a community engagement officer whose role is to coordinate and deliver activities in the
local area that focus on promoting the headspace brand and the service provided by headspace
centres, and building young people’s knowledge and reducing the stigma associated with mental
health problems to encourage earlier help-seeking. During interviews, staff described a number of
local events that their centre had arranged such as visiting local schools and talking to students
and staff, hosting drama and music events, facilitating drop-in sessions for local young people,
and holding information evenings for key stakeholders such as school counsellors and principals.
Further, headspace staff also worked to raise community awareness of mental health problems by
participating in national events such as Youth Week and NAIDOC Week. In a survey of headspace
centre managers (n=29), the majority of respondents self-rated their centre as ‘very effective’ in
raising the awareness of youth mental health issues (15/29). This result was supported by interview
data.
All the staff who discussed community engagement during interviews were very supportive of their
centres’ activities and discussed related benefits such as asserting the organisation’s focus on
early intervention and prevention, and enabling young people to become familiar with the centre
Social Policy Research Centre 2015
headspace Evaluation Final Report
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