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This article was first published on Thursday, June 27, 2024
An international social prescribing conference is taking place in Sydney this week, enabling discussions about “tactical urbanism”, the multiple roles of libraries, social change, and the importance of efforts to build social connections.
Dr Amy Coopes reports for the Croakey Conference News Service.
Amy Coopes writes:
In a world still very much reeling from the “social recession” of COVID-19, Australia is facing a “tsunami” of isolation and loneliness that will require a rethink on how we live, the spaces we inhabit, and the prescription of imagination and justice.
These were some of the key messages shared at an international conference in Sydney this week focused on social prescribing and its four central tenets – environment, activity, connection and health (EACH).
The conference, which is streaming content under the hashtag #EACH24, features delegates and speakers from a broad church of disciplines including First Nations cultural practice, visual arts, music, dance, horticulture, housing, medicine and mental health.
It opened on Tuesday with a Welcome to Gadigal Nura from Deputy Chair of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council Councillor Yvonne Weldon AM, who emphasised the importance of connection, and this was a theme that featured prominently across the conference’s first two days.
A number of keynote and workshop speakers spoke to the crisis of social isolation, a global public health and social justice issue that had become ever-more entrenched by responses to and fallout from the pandemic.
Conference MC Robin Mellon described COVID-19 as a “social recession” for which we were paying a heavy price.
Loneliness had now reached “endemic, or epidemic” proportions among Australians, Mount Druitt GP Dr Jaspreet Saini told the conference, sharing alarming figures echoed by a host of other presenters.
One in three Australians reported experiencing loneliness, with one in six putting this at extreme or severe levels, the conference heard. Some 15 percent of the population reported feeling often or always lonely.
Saini said more than half of his daily consults were now mental health-related, and isolation – particularly for older Australians – was “a crisis that we are in the middle of right now”.
“My older patients are running out of options for where they go to connect with other people,” Saini said, describing the flipside of our burgeoning life expectancy as decades of post-retirement loneliness never before seen or confronted by earlier generations.
“We have pushed Australia away from good health, from good social relationships, we now have endemic or an epidemic of social isolation in our older population… There is a tsunami that we are about to face and we have to wake up to that.”
Success stories
EACH24, which is hosted by ASPIRE and is running over three days at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Library of NSW, is tackling these questions head-on, sharing success stories and suggestions for reform from the realm of social prescribing.
In simple terms, social prescribing invites clinicians and other practitioners to think outside the box when helping patients with chronic health concerns. Instead of dispensing a medicine, it involves prescription of activities like walking, singing in a group, gardening, creating or immersing in art or music as a form of therapy.
Conference organisers are, in fact, walking the talk, asking delegates at time of registration to nominate an activity they would like to be socially prescribed for the sidelines of the conference, including a nature, culture or history walk, cooking, art, music or board games session.
Evonne Miller, Professor of Design Psychology at Queensland University of Technology and Director of the QUT Design Lab, delivered and chaired a well-received plenary session on designing environments for wellbeing, and in ways that combat loneliness.
Under the banner of what she called “tactical urbanism”, Miller made the case for built and natural environment initiatives that facilitated connection, while also being biophilic, playable and sustainable.
These included building swings instead of seats at bus-stops, pop-up “buddy seats”, grief benches, hopscotch grids to bubblers and bins, and public paths that were not just walkable but ‘walk-worthy’ – places to pick fruit and flowers and cultivate connections.
Much underestimated in the loneliness literature was the sheer amount of time required to forge a connection, Miller said.
Research showed that it took, on average, 50 hours to establish a casual friendship, and another 40 hours to take that to the level of a good friend. Close friendships required at least 200 hours to take root, Miller said.
Social change matters
Bridging these gaps required a radical gear shift on how we thought about place, and asked us to tap into what Professor Brydie-Leigh Bartleet from The Creative Change Project at Griffith University described as a “deep wellspring” of knowledge from First Nations peoples on the power of art, culture and storytelling.
Bartleet, who spoke on community music-making for promoting social equity, grew up in apartheid South Africa and said that experience had shaped a lifelong belief in the potential of art to effect social change.
Dr Christen Cornell, from the Federal Government agency Creative Australia, said Indigenous people had for millennia drawn on these mediums to “work against forces of alienation, connecting us with ourselves and one another”.
Cornell was speaking on a panel with experts including Keir Paterson, CEO of Neighbourhood Houses Victoria, who advocated for approaches that valued intrinsic human worth – “seeing people as people and not merely units of economic production”.
Bartleet went further, arguing that social prescribing must not fall into the trap of being a “feel-good” Band-Aid which failed to confront the systemic preconditions for ill health and disadvantage.
She gave the example of going into a youth detention facility to deliver a music program, and failing to simultaneously advocate against the carceral state.
There were warm reflections on the importance of libraries from Cathie Warburton, head of the Australian Library and Information Association, who told delegates there were still more public library branches in Australia than McDonald’s franchises, and that their power lay in accepting all comers without question or judgement – whether to cool down, warm up or simply daydream.
Miller’s closing remarks appeared to strike a chord with most, reflecting on the nature of social prescribing really being “the art of the possible”, and requiring curiosity, generosity, resilience and reciprocity to be at its heart.
“The imagining of possibilities is not the job of politicians and bureaucrats – it’s ours,” she said.
• EACH24 continues in Sydney today for its third and final day. On X/Twitter, follow #EACH24, @CroakeyNews, @WePublicHealth and @DrRuthAtLarge as well as the ASPIRE secretariat at @creatingopps.
Previously at Croakey
Social prescribing hits the spotlight, with international conference set to profile innovative health and social solutions, by Dr Ruth Armstrong
With climate disruption set to worsen, how might a National Urban Policy support health and wellbeing? By Dr Melissa Sweet
The Health Wrap: reform matters, social prescribing, the arts – and putting the kids in charge (2023), By Dr Lesley Russell
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