Video Transcription

I AM Murray – depression

To rock up to a country town, to a rugby club, and to see all those cars parked there, ready to hear what we had to say and ready to start that change, was just absolutely fantastic. I suppose you don’t listen, Lee. You’ll be driving down the city, and you don’t know anybody. But when you’re around here, you get familiar with people. You get to know the struggles that they go through, and it gives you that opportunity to be that help that they need.

The statistics around mental health in regional communities are outrageous. Everybody’s been talking about the drought recently, and that has a massive impact, not just on the farmers, but the townships themselves along the road. We’ve dropped into a number of community centers, and while these services are available, they’re really under the pump. So what we’re trying to do is promote that friendship in that community, to be the first point of call, so that when they go to the support services, it’s not a crisis point. We’re actually getting a lot earlier education and awareness around how to take charge, and people can start to implement their own strategies and techniques on how they can look after themselves. Most importantly, how they can look after their friends and family in the community.

And that’s what the “Get Talking To” is all about. We’re bringing together Four Tier, New South Wales Positive Rugby, so that we can, through rugby clubs and through that community, actually start these conversations and smash the stigma. I think this “Get Talking To” is a catalyst. It’s a catalyst for change, and it’s a catalyst for beginning those conversations. We want country people in these communities to know that if they are battling with mental health, they’re not alone, that support is out there, and that it’s okay to get that support if they need it.

A lot of people won’t pick the fair enough, but they could be at a community-based event whereby people will start to talk about it, and they’ll realize it’s just not them who are experiencing these problems. This tour is all about starting those positive conversations, providing the education and the training on how to safely talk about mental health. To me, that’s the important thing. You’re leaving them with something that helps. It’s not a fly-in, fly-out and leave them by themselves. We’re empowering the community to provide a service for themselves and their people.

Yeah, look, people got a way to use rugby. It’s a really great family community game. I think one of the more important things about our game that sometimes isn’t spoken about is that it has core values and expectations. We can install those behaviors into the people within our greater community. That’s something that’s special, unique to our game. You know, a lot of the things that they were talking about in the seminar, I will be able to help younger children do. Having more programs like the T program come out and spread the word to the kids, and having people with real-life stories interacting with them, will go a long way into talking to these kids too.

His one story about it really got into depth a bit more and made you understand that you’re not alone—that there are other people out there that are sad. I’d love it to come back to care. It’s been fantastic hearing people’s experiences and how they opened up about their own journey of mental health issues. It’s been an eye-opener for myself and how to, in turn, deal with it. To see people back it and get behind an event, which they didn’t know what it was going to be—all they knew was that it was about mental health—but they were prepared to come along and learn and be vulnerable and open up so that they could change the way that the community engages, and that’s amazing. That’s a really special and beautiful thing about regional New South Wales.

Video by batyr