RAISING SUPERHEROES

When award-winning journalist and mother Shannon Harvey (My Year of Living Mindfully) set out to understand why anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide are rising among young people, she found herself asking a bigger question. Is mental illness preventable?

Her search takes her from early childhood centres in Boston to trauma informed classrooms in Nashville, from a Detroit school reborn as a neighbourhood lifeline to remote Himalayan villages in Nepal, and to schools in Adelaide taking power back from the tech companies.

What she finds is radical and full of hope. Mental illness is not inevitable. When protective factors like safety, connection and stable relationships outweigh the risks, children's outcomes change even in the hardest conditions. And so the question changes. It is no longer what is wrong with our children, but what is wrong with the world we have built around them, and what we are willing to do about it.

Faced with solutions that work but are left to fail, Shannon steps beyond journalism, because knowing is no longer enough.

Includes Q&A with Shannon Harvey