What’s the big deal? Depression, anxiety, bipolar personality, post-traumatic stress, etc. Are these really so important? Sure, they’re uncomfortable and inconvenient, but how urgent are they compared to real problems like a pandemic or global warming? Surely, we are over-blowing the importance of mental health, right?

Wrong! Actually, we’re not exaggerating the importance of mental health. The personal, local, and global impacts of mental disorders are a huge burden and cost to society. They say that to solve a problem, first, we must agree that there is a problem. Also, finding the solution sometimes requires a different approach. At this time, it seems most would agree that there is a problem with mental health in this country and worldwide, but is there a better approach, and if so, what is it? This is the story presented here.

The prevalence of mental and behavioral health problems is currently high in most, if not all, countries. In the U.S. and elsewhere we have seen the impact of an increasingly stressful time, as we live through the pandemic, social unrest, war, and divisive politics. Costs of mental health problems include not only the direct expense of treatment but also indirect costs of loss of productivity and the impacts on society, including substance abuse, family dysfunction, homelessness, crime, etc. The headspace model, which originated in Australia, is a new approach for addressing mental health issues for adolescents and young adults. After almost two decades in operation, this model has demonstrated an encouraging degree of success. Because of the positive results from Australia, several other countries have tried (or are trying) to adopt the same model, typically focused on the youth. This paper aims at exploring how the new Australian approach to mental health care might be applied more broadly across the population, and specifically, how the headspace model might be an example for designing services for adults in the U.S. Why focus on adults? Because their disorders are more likely to be more deeply embedded, they have more direct impacts on the economy and the community, and they do not have a safety net of a school system or parental influence.