The Push Up Challenge

This week my guest is the fierce and wonderful president of HAES Australia, Dr Carolynne White! A Facebook post from Headspace in Hervey Bay fired her (and many others) up when it claimed that eating sugary food causes mental health problems! As a mental health expert and anti-diet advocate, Carolynne knows how much this kind of messaging oversimplifies, stigmatises, and downright does damage. The fact that the SUGAR IS EVIL message is being spruiked by one of Australia’s leading adolescent mental health organisations is a worry. Particularly when it’s part of “The Push Up Challenge”, a fund raiser for Headspace which raises awareness about youth suicide by forcing people to do over a hundred push ups a day. Has anyone at Headspace heard of eating disorders? Why is encouraging excessive exercise in teens ok? Do they know how hung up young people are about body image and health? WHAT ON EARTH ARE THEY THINKING!? Join us as we rant about this extremely ill advised campaign. The truth is, mental health and physical health just can’t be separated, and we need to be doing a lot more critical thinking to avoid doing harm! CW: Discussions about suicide, mental illness & eating disorders.

Show Notes

My guest this week is Dr Carolynne White, occupational therapist and health promotion lecturer. Through her professional experience and her PhD research, Carolynne has formed the strong opinion that good mental health is absolutely necessary to support good overall health. Carolynne is also the president of HAES Australia. Carolynne got all fired up about a facebook post from Headspace at Hervey Bay in Queensland, about a ‘push up challenge’ to raise awareness about suicide and to raise money for Headspace. Headspace is a very well funded network of mental health treatment centres for adolescents and young people. Headspace enjoy a lot of government funding here in Australia, and also gather a lot of attention in the media. Their Mission is ‘to provide tailored and holistic mental health support to young people aged 12-25”. They focus on early intervention and prevention of mental illness, as well as focusing on physical health as well. According to the website, the ‘push up challenge’ was started by a ‘bunch of mates’ passionate about the topic. The challenge involves doing 3128 push ups over the month of August - one for each life lost to suicide in 2017. This is a LOT of push ups - over 100 a day. Louise’s first thought - why are headspace supporting an initiative that uses the symptoms of a major mental illness - ie the compulsive exercise aspects of an eating disorder - to raise awareness of mental illness? It just seems very ill advised. Particularly when you consider that eating disorder have the highest mortality rate, particularly from suicide, among young people. The man who started the push up challenge is Nick Hudson, he’s from Perth. He’s a white Aussie bloke in his thirties. Louise found 2 media articles about him which said slightly different things. One said he had heart surgery as a child, and when he got older his fitness declined and he realised he needed more heart surgery. This made him depressed, and one of the ways he came out of the depression was to start this push up challenge. But then another news article which came out about the same time (and was accompanied by a truly awful ‘Fitspo on steroids’ picture) said that his father had suffered from depression for many years but had never told him. When he discovered the depression, he ‘did some research’ on mental health. Then he and his mates, who do push ups as part of their regular fitness regime, decided to turn it into something more. So it’s odd to have 2 such different stories out there in the media, normally people have just one story, but there you go. There is a level of privilege reflected in the message that in order to come out of depression you need to do a few push ups. It’s great that this happened for him, but many people need a lot mor