Matt sits down with A/Prof Hannah Wardill, who leads the Supportive Oncology Research Group at the University of Adelaide and SAHMRI, and Natalie Tuckey, a health and clinical psychologist finishing a PhD on multiple myeloma.
Together they've spent the past few years taking a wellbeing skills program built for workplaces and rebuilding it for people living with a rare, incurable blood cancer. It's delivered in peer groups by specialist myeloma nurses, and it exists because consumers asked for it.
Their answer so far is yes, it's possible. But not by accident, and not by waiting until someone falls apart first.
What we cover:
- Why mental health support in Australia mostly arrives once someone is already in crisis, and what a program built for the years before that point looks like.
- Why specialist myeloma nurses turned out to be the right people to deliver it, and what it did for the nurses themselves.
- Why this program landed when similar content struggled in workplaces and universities.
- The friction between a flexible, individualised wellbeing program and the fixed endpoints of a randomised controlled trial.
- What came out of 40+ interviews about end of life, and why "fear of recurrence" might be the wrong phrase for what people actually mean.
Chapters:
00:00 Meet Hannah and Nat
03:04 A PhD in multiple myeloma and smouldering myeloma
07:44 What the program is, and why it runs as a peer group
09:05 The three aims of the project
11:00 Dom, and the consumers who asked for mental health care
12:19 Why support only arrives once you're in crisis
17:14 "We already do wellbeing"
19:03 The unsung heroes of supportive care
24:52 Why this landed when the workplace programs didn't
29:11 What surprised a lab scientist about wellbeing research
34:20 Fitting a wellbeing program into a clinical trial
38:06 The participant who dropped out and still benefited
45:50 The Death Festival
52:04 The loneliness nobody talks about
55:06 Fear of recurrence, or fear of dying?
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZKJumS7dKzrB6stwsrnNV33fEd5lVe9M
Join the community on Substack: https://wellbeingexplained.substack.com/podcast
Follow Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-iasiello/
Follow Matt on Substack: https://substack.com/@mattiasiello
Follow Hannah Wardill: https://au.linkedin.com/in/hannahrosewardill
Follow Natalie Tuckey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-t-68712035/
Researching Happy is hosted by Be Well Co's Head of Research & Translation. Be Well Co is a social enterprise by Camp Quality that focuses on proactive mental health and wellbeing care. Through evidence-based wellbeing workshops and programs to organisations, Be Well Co is on a mission to make an impact for the 5 million Australians currently languishing.
Website: https://www.bewellco.io/
