2015 Scholarship Winner
Editor’s note (July 2026): The A Better Australia Scholarship program is no longer offered by The Expert Editor. This post is kept as a historical record of Heidi-May’s 2015 win.
The Expert Editor would like to congratulate Heidi-May Mcrenolyds from Sydney University for winning the 2015 A Better Australia Scholarship Program.
She was awarded $1000 to help implement change in how Australia deals with mental illness.
Here is her entry.
“It’s all in your head”
As a nursing student with an interest in mental health and policy development, my ideal change in Australia is to eradicate stigma surrounding mental illness and to stop saying “it’s all in your head”. Australia has a world class healthcare system and prides itself on being accepting, understanding and giving people ‘a fair go’; but stigma is a barrier to the provision of mental health care. As a student, I spend time with patients with a variety of health problems. Recently, a patient asked me “can I still be a nurse if I have bipolar?” and I thought “why not? If you can recover from almost any other physical health problem and still be a nurse, why is bipolar different?”. My patient exemplified how societal views can underpin self-limiting attitudes and are a barrier to patient recovery.
I hope to eradicate stigma surrounding mental illness in three ways: provision of holistic nursing care in my own practice; contributing to the evidence base about efficiently integrating physical and mental health care to inform health policy development; and to produce societal change underpinned by policy that advocates for patients and increases public awareness.
Editor’s note (July 2026): The following sections were added in 2026 for context.
Why This Entry Stood Out
The judging panel was struck by the clarity and personal authenticity of Heidi-May’s entry. Rather than presenting a purely abstract argument, she grounded her case in a real clinical encounter — the question posed by a patient living with bipolar disorder — and used that moment to illuminate a much broader systemic problem. This approach demonstrated exactly the kind of thinking the scholarship was designed to reward: the ability to connect individual experience to wider social and policy change.
Her essay also shows a sophisticated understanding of how stigma operates on multiple levels simultaneously. At the individual level, it shapes the way a patient sees her own future (“can I still be a nurse?”). At the institutional level, it influences how care is delivered and how resources are allocated. And at the societal level, it is reinforced by language — the casual dismissal embedded in a phrase like “it’s all in your head” — and by the persistent cultural tendency to treat mental illness as a character flaw rather than a health condition.
Heidi-May’s proposed three-part response to this problem — personal practice, evidence contribution, and policy advocacy — reflects a mature, realistic roadmap. She recognised that lasting change cannot come from any single intervention, and that a nurse’s influence extends far beyond the bedside.
The Broader Conversation: Mental Health Stigma in Australia
The issue Heidi-May raises is one of genuine national importance. Mental illness is common, affecting a significant proportion of Australians at some point in their lives, yet many people who experience symptoms delay seeking help or avoid it altogether — not because services are unavailable, but because of shame, fear of judgement, or concern about how a diagnosis might affect their career, relationships, or sense of identity. The very hesitation in Heidi-May’s patient — wondering aloud whether a diagnosis disqualifies her from the profession she is training for — is a small but telling illustration of that dynamic.
Language plays a central role in perpetuating stigma. Phrases that trivialise psychological distress (“just snap out of it”, “cheer up”, “it’s all in your head”) send a clear implicit message: that mental suffering is not real in the way physical suffering is, and that the person experiencing it has some degree of control or responsibility they are failing to exercise. These messages, repeated across workplaces, schools, families, and media, accumulate into a cultural norm that makes disclosure feel risky.
Healthcare settings are not immune to this. Patients with mental health diagnoses sometimes report that their physical complaints are taken less seriously, or that their mental health history becomes the default explanation for any presenting symptom. Holistic nursing care — the approach Heidi-May commits to in her essay — directly counters this tendency by treating the whole person rather than categorising their needs into a hierarchy where “physical” always comes first.
We extend our warmest congratulations once again to Heidi-May, and hope she has gone on to make a difference in her nursing career and beyond.