Protect children from life-long mental illness

“All too often, kids only come to notice when they are already experiencing severe anxiety, depression, or other mental health conditions – and it's too late to protect them."

– Associate Professor Justine Gatt, Director of the Centre for Wellbeing, Resilience and Recovery at NeuRA.

In Australia, 1 in every 7 adolescents is diagnosed with a mental health condition

It's clear that far too many children are missing out on the vital support they need to protect their mental wellbeing. We currently lack an effective way to measure all aspects of a child's social and psychological wellbeing.

The earlier we can identify children who need help, the more chance we have of preventing the potentially life-long mental illnesses that frequently emerge during adolescence.

The power of early intervention: COMPAS-KIDS scale

At NeuRA, we envision a future where every child receives the help they need right when they need it. To achieve this, Associate Professor Justine Gatt and her team are developing and testing the COMPAS-KIDS scale. This unique wellbeing tool will finally enable us to understand what factors make some children more able to cope with stress.

In consultation with paediatric specialists, the COMPAS-KIDS scale has been adapted from the COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale for adults – a pioneering tool already used as the basis for several successful mental wellbeing programs. Now, through the COMPAS-KIDS Wellbeing Study, Professor Gatt and her team are collecting essential data to validate its use with children aged 5 – 12 years.

Your gift today can support this groundbreaking research and help make the COMPAS-KIDS scale widely available for parents, schools, and clinicians as soon as possible – before any more children fall through the cracks.

If we can identify and help children at risk of mental illness before they develop symptoms, we can change the course of their entire lives.

Study impact: improving parent-child communication

The COMPAS-KIDS Wellbeing Study is already opening the way for transformative conversations about mental health between parents and their children.

For parent Alice, whose two daughters took part in this research last year, the experience has been invaluable.

“As parents, we have perceptions of what our children are feeling, but it was very useful to hear them talk about what was difficult for them and to see how they perceived things and their understanding of themselves.

The best thing was that it gave us opportunities to continue the conversation afterwards. It's not always easy to get your children talking about how they feel, so this really helped us to get the girls help with the specific challenges they were each facing."

No child should ever have to wait for help until it’s “too late” to protect them from mental illness. The earlier we can identify children who need help, the more chance we have of preventing the potentially life-long mental illnesses that frequently emerge during adolescence.

Please donate generously to support groundbreaking medical research.