Mental Health and Resilience go Hand in Hand
We compiled a list of tips for managing physical and mental health for times when we may need to restrict our movements or self-isolate. Tips like staying connected, keeping a routine, moving and exercising body and mind – whatever it takes to get through it.
Check out some of these tips:
- Tips for staying healthy and well
- Resources – things to do in self-isolation
- Sleep – our best kept secret
Check out our multiple support programs and seek help before crisis hits.
In an emergency call: 000. Lifeline – 13 11 14. Kids Help Line (5–25 years) – 1800 55 1800.
Stress
One of the main contributors to mental illness is stress. It’s a good idea to know what triggers stress, what it does to us and how we can help prevent it:
Trauma
Gabor Mate, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author defines trauma as follows:
Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds.
Gabor Mate
Our Programs
At Burdekin we offer therapeutic, holistic, evidence-based, trauma-informed care to our young people. We offer physical and emotional safety – above all – to our young people and our staff. We support young people so they can trust us. Our staff are fully trained to recognise the signs and symptoms of trauma and offer care that is sensitive to our young people’s racial, ethnic, and cultural background, and gender identity.
Healing
Bessel van der Kolk, in his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, explores “the extreme disconnection from the body that so many people with histories of trauma and neglect experience” and the most fertile paths to recovery by drawing on his own work and a wealth of other research in three main areas of study: neuroscience, which deals with how mental processes function within the brain; developmental psychopathology, concerned with how painful experiences impact the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, which examines how our own behaviour affects the psychoemotional and neurobiological states of those close to us…. read more.
World Mental Health Day falls on October 10th, not so coincidentally World Homelessness Day falls on the same day.
At the National Youth Homelessness Conference in 2021, Prof. Brian Burdekin AO says:
The Covid 19 pandemic followed closely on the heels of widespread bush fires and floods. The latest evidence is
Prof. Brian Burdekin AO
that these events have been extremely stressful – including for many young Australians – particularly our most
disadvantaged young people.
He also quotes a recent interview with Prof. Pat McGorry:
At least one million young Australians a year are affected by serious mental illness” we know that many
Prof Pat McGorry
thousands of those have schizophrenia – (expert evidence indicates approximately 10% of those young
people will take their own lives if they don’t get adequate care.)
Read more here. And in the National Homelessness Conference 2019:
In the Mental Illness Report we concluded there were very strong links between homelessness and
Prof. Brian Burdekin AO
its tendency to exacerbate difficulties suffered by mentally ill people –and between mental illness
and its tendency to increase the risk of homelessness. Clearly there was an inter-relationship there
which had to be addressed and in many ways which was not being addressed.
Read more here.