Push-ups for mental health

Mental health workers in the Pilbara are urging the community to join them in an initiative to raise awareness for mental health and wellbeing.

Headspace Pilbara has urged the community to join them in the national push-up challenge, which runs for three weeks beginning next Monday, running through to May 31.

Established in 2017 by Nick Hudson, a Perth engineer who fell into depression before and after open-heart surgery, the challenge sees participants complete 3046 push-ups to represent the number of Australians who died by suicide in 2018.

Headspace Pilbara community development officer Dee Juskov said the organisation was excited to take part in the initiative.

“Push-ups aren’t easy for us, so we thought we would have some fun with it,” she said.

“So the staff have brought different outfits to get us excited and revved up for it, and we’re going to mix it up with other activities.”

Ms Juskov said the challenge had been moved forward to May as headspace had had a lot of young people reach out saying they were bored and worried about losing their fitness.

She said the focus this year was participation rather than fundraising because of the number of people who had lost their jobs.

“If people do fundraise, this year it actually goes to the local headspace centre rather than headspace national,” she said.

Ms Juskov said people could take part even if they were unable to do push-ups.

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