Background: Building community capacity for mental wellbeing recognition and response is essential for suicide prevention. However, many communities lack accessible, locally-relevant resources that reflect diverse voices and experiences. This presentation examines how co-designed, evidence based mental wellbeing literacy initiatives can unite communities around shared hope and resilience.
Methods: Developed from a thorough needs analysis, the campaign’s multifaceted approach incorporates literature review, community engagement and targeted strategies. It encourages individuals to identify factors contributing to their wellbeing and integrate simple yet impactful activities into their daily routines.
The needs analysis highlighted the shift towards wellbeing promotion over risk reduction in mental health campaigns. The campaign takes a strengths-based approach, helping people identify what good mental health and wellbeing looks like for them and how they can achieve it, by considering the positive things they can and often already do in their daily lives. It empowers individuals to take charge of their own mental health and wellbeing, to tap into their strengths and better equip them to manage challenges and uncertainty.
The campaign responded iteratively to new research and feedback from participants and was developed into a mobile app in May 2025.
Results: Preliminary evaluation in 2024 indicated that there was wide acceptance across Tasmania of a new and novel way to engage in personal wellbeing promotion, as well as some evidence of behaviour change and stigma reduction. The evaluation of the app is being conducted and will take metrics from the app itself, where users can report on the impact using the app has had, as well as focus groups reporting on the user experience, impact of participation and key wellbeing promotion themes that can be identified. This report will be finalised in December 2025.
Conclusions: Key learnings from the campaign so far include: