When award-winning journalist and mother Shannon Harvey (My Year of Living Mindfully) set out to understand why anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide are rising among young people, she found herself asking a bigger question. Is mental illness preventable?

Her search takes her from early childhood centres in Boston to trauma-informed classrooms in Nashville, from a Detroit school reborn as a neighbourhood lifeline to remote Himalayan villages in Nepal, and to a school in Adelaide taking power back from the tech companies.

What she finds is radical and full of hope. Mental illness is not inevitable. When protective factors like safety, connection and stable relationships outweigh the risks, children's outcomes change even in the hardest conditions. And so the question changes. It is no longer what is wrong with our children, but what is wrong with the world we have built around them.

But the deeper Shannon digs, the more troubling the picture becomes. The programs changing children's lives are surviving on short-term grants and the goodwill of the people who run them. The evidence is strong and the solutions exist, yet the money keeps flowing to the crisis end of the system. For a journalist trained to observe and report, standing on the sidelines no longer feels like an option.

Up against political resistance and entrenched systems, Raising Superheroes becomes a deeply personal journey into what it takes to turn evidence into action.

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