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Narration:

A quick note ahead of this episode: Today, we will be discussing themes of mental health, self-harm and suicide. If this isn’t the right episode for you right now, we encourage you to check out some of the other Business Of Leadership episodes that are available in this series.

If you need to talk to someone, and you are based in Australia, you can contact Lifeline at Thirteen Eleven Fourteen for crisis support.

Evidence of the physical toll of COVID-19 is everywhere. Illness, isolation and loss of income are just some of the all too tangible examples of how we have been impacted by COVID-19. And we are only just beginning to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on our mental health. 

Crisis support service Lifeline Australia reported a 40% increase in service delivery, as Australians adjusted to new challenges around life and work at the height of the pandemic. There has also been a marked shift in our collective attitudes towards mental health.

In this episode, we will be discussing how mental health support organisations are leveraging emerging technologies to provide better access and get bigger reach. What is the real cost of inaction when it comes to mental health? And is there still a stigma attached to mental health issues - or are we seeing greater understanding and acceptance? 

We’ll also be looking at the impact of poor mental health in the world of work – how employees and organisations alike are coping. What impact did the pandemic have on employee work-life balance? And how can workplaces take action now to help employees maintain their mental health and wellbeing, for the benefit of the organisation and individual alike?

First up, Professor Nick Wailes:, Senior Deputy Dean and Director at AGSM speaks with Thilini Perera:, CEO of Lifeline International, about how the organisation has navigated the pandemic and what the future holds for how organisations deliver crisis support.

Next, Professor Frederik Anseel:, Senior Deputy Dean (Research & Enterprise) at ¹úÃñ²ÊƱ Business School and President of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology joins us. He shares findings from his research into the impact of COVID-19 on workplace mental health, as well as sharing what steps organisations can take to create a more mentally healthy work environment.

Now, here’s Nick Wailes: speaking with Thilini Perera::

Nick Wailes:

Hi everybody. It's Nick Wailes: here, the Director of AGSM and I'm welcoming you to another edition of The Business Of podcast. This session is the business of mental health, really important issue and one that's growing in everyone's attention, and I'm delighted that our guest today is Thilini Perera:, the Chief Executive Officer of Lifeline International. Great to have you here, Thilini and really looking forward to our conversation.

Thilini Perera:

Likewise, Nick, and thanks for having me.

Nick Wailes:

Really interesting to find out about you and how did you get to the role that you're in now and what have you done in the lead up to that?

Thilini Perera:

Yeah, thanks Nick. I didn't start out thinking I would end up here to be honest. I studied to be a lawyer. I graduated, I trained as a lawyer and then somewhere along that journey, I joined Lifeline Australia in 2010 as part of their corporate governance and legal team. And I suppose, as they say, the rest is history, I actually started to appreciate and understand that all communities and people and families and friends are impacted by mental health and suicide prevention on some level. But the important thing is I actually appreciated that suicide is preventable and we can do something about it. And I say this because I grew up in Sri Lanka before I moved to Australia to study law. And we went through a civil conflict in Sri Lanka and tsunamis and a whole bunch of challenging situations. And so mental health and suicide prevention wasn't widely talked about in an environment that I grew up in. 

So, when I joined Lifeline Australia and understood that there's so many things we can do together as a community to save lives, it really inspired me. And so I worked at Lifeline Australia for 10 years as part of the executive team. And then in July last year, I had a fantastic opportunity to take on the role as CEO of Lifeline International. And I grabbed it with both hands and now I have the opportunity to work with 21 Lifeline member countries across 20 countries around the world. And they deliver lifesaving crisis support services in all of those countries. 

Nick Wailes:

I think all of us have heard about Lifeline and we've watched on the broadcast where Lifeline is always the first port of call for people and we've all seen it, but really interested to find out how it's organised. So, maybe you could talk about the organisation that you ran in Australia and how that's structured and how that operates. But then also talk a little bit more about Lifeline International, the organisation you're running now because I think very interesting to find out about those. 

Thilini Perera:

Yeah, of course. So how it works in Australia, Nick, is that anyone experiencing a crisis or suicide ideation can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, or text us, or contact us on web chat. And it's a national service, which means there's thousands of volunteers and crisis supporters around the country ready to take your call or text or web chat and ready to engage with you. And basically, when you contact Lifeline, you enter the first a national call queue. And the first available crisis supporter anywhere in the country will answer that call and they will follow a practise model that'll help deescalate the emotions of the person and work through the emotions, listen to them without judgement and with empathy, to bring them to a safe space and often even create a safe plan if they're in crisis. Now, if someone contacts us and is experiencing imminent risk to their life or to someone else's life or property, we will then work with police to work through the necessary interventions to save lives. 

So in a nutshell, that's how it works in Australia, but it's not just the crisis intervention part that Lifeline Australia does. There are 41 centres across 60 locations around Australia. And each of those centres also deliver community based prevention and postvention services. So they train the community to understand how to spot the signs of someone experiencing crisis or suicide ideation and what to do and how to respond in that situation. And then if we look across some of the Lifelines globally, they're all organised in slightly different ways, depending on the community and country they operate in. So for example, some of our members across Africa operate not just a crisis line for suicide prevention, but concurrently align for child protection to deal with gender-based violence and HIV, because all of those things compound the mental health and suicide prevention situation in those respective countries. 

So, it's nuanced to meet the needs of that particular community. So, we might organise ourselves slightly differently, but the commonality is that everybody operates a crisis helpline. And basically, then you access a telehealth service to receive support from someone that you've never met before. And often it's a one off interaction because if you call Lifeline, you'll meet someone, they'll talk to you. And then the next time you call, it could be someone else. So, it is very much a one off interaction. 

Nick Wailes:

So, Thilini, I think all of us know that mental health is not only bad for our community, but it has an economic cost as well. And we've seen a significant increase during the pandemic of reported cases of mental ill health. Just help me, what's the size of the increase of call on your services? And what are some of the estimates of the costs of mental ill health for the Australian economy, for example?

Thilini Perera:

Yeah, Nick, just over two years ago, we were averaging a Lifeline Australia under 2,500 calls to our service per day. And in the height of the pandemic, we were regularly seeing more than 3,500 calls per day, which was a 40% increase in terms of service delivery. And so, I think that's a significant increase and wasn't dissimilar to other parts of the world where there was a huge increase in demand for services.

Nick Wailes:

As an organisation, you have to mobilise thousands and thousands of voluntary counsellors. You have to ensure that they're trained. You have to have really robust systems in there. So how big is the organisation in Australia that actually is able to create and maintain that system? 

Thilini Perera:

Yes is a huge operation in that sense, as I said, we've got 41 centres that actually spend that time recruiting, managing, supporting volunteers, training them to come on the phones, supervising them. We have a duty of care not just to the person contacting us, but for the crisis supporter and the volunteer who takes the call to make sure they're looked after, that someone's debriefing with them, that there are supervision frameworks in place to support the person taking the call. There are practise models, reviews for quality control and safety issues, ensuring that we're also meeting legislative requirements around safety and reporting, working with police on various aspects. And then there's a technology side of it, the platforms, the ICT and how we can actually use it, the national infrastructure to ensure that there's a seamless service. 

Lifeline in Australia is working towards a system of an omnichannel platform where we can seamlessly text, call, use web chat and seamlessly move through systems and services across those channels as needed in the future and use those platforms interchangeably, hopefully in the future to manage overflow on one particular channel, perhaps as well. And speaking of, if we can explore that a little bit the role of technology in suicide prevention, I think it's a very interesting time, particularly following COVID, that we are living in, that we can actually use technology in a way that we haven't before across the world to ensure that more people can access help. So, because during COVID, we couldn't actually meet people face to face and attend those really critically important face to face counselling sessions. 

I know that most people turn to telehealth services in a way they hadn't before. We've looked at numerous studies that show us across the world that the demand on crisis helplines increased significantly during the pandemic. People were stuck at home, they were experiencing fear of infection, loneliness, but they could still make contact with Lifeline in most different countries or crisis helplines and use those channels and telecommunications and technology to connect with someone to receive help. 

Nick Wailes:

That's really interesting. So, you're saying COVID actually showed how valuable these things are and what a significant role they can play in all of our efforts to improve mental health and reduce suicide. And that sort of became obvious. So am really interested in the technology because in some ways Lifeline is almost like a technology business, right? 

The fact that it exists was the growth and use of telephones. And someone leveraged that technology to say, this is a great way for us to do these things. I'm sure that you guys are at the forefront of some of those PABX technologies and how do you reroute calls and all of those types of things. And then, but now you're confronting sort of mobile, you've got different demographics using different channels and all of those sort of things.

We've got our core business, but we have to think about what are the new channels we add on and how we best to operate in social media, for example?  

Thilini Perera: 

Yeah. Look, that's a really interesting question. And we've been on quite a journey. So Lifeline started in Australia in 1963. And as you said, in 1963 using a phone to deliver a crisis support service was revolutionary. Hadn't been done before. Then we move across to then moving to a text more recently and web chat. And in the future, no doubt will be social media and a number of other mechani