In 2024, there will be 27,224 people aged 15-19 living in the ACT, and 1,682,614 Australia-wide. Mental illness accounts for over 50% of the illness burden of young people aged 15-25 years, and bushfires can have devastating impacts on mental health. Protecting young people's capacity to function and adapt during and after an environmental disaster involves actively fostering readiness and resilience, which requires an understanding of their lived experience and information needs. Still, the perspectives and needs of young people are frequently absent from discourse and strategies surrounding bushfire health messages and information.

This project will address unmet information and mental health needs of young people impacted by bushfires in Australia. It will establish an evidence base to support the development of future bushfire communication strategies that include young people in their scope, and produce a motion comic for young people that promotes mental wellbeing, recovery and resilience following experiences of bushfire.

It builds on our prior work exploring and meeting the information needs of primary school aged children impacted by the 2019-2020 “Black Summer” bushfires, and subsequent development of a picture book (for ages 4-8) and a chapter book (for ages 9+) to meet these needs. The current project will focus on comic books given their popularity with teens, especially reluctant readers. Comics have previously been used to convey health information, support mental health, and convey information regarding natural disasters. Qualitative analysis of lived experience is well suited to inform the development of archetypal characters and storylines that capture real-world experiences and meet real-world information needs at the aggregate level (that is, without directly representing a single person’s exact story). An example of the research team’s prior comic output regarding the mental health experiences of Australians during COVID-19 can be found in the attached documents.

Motion comics are a hybrid medium at the intersection between comic books, animation, and digital entertainment, and are well suited to attract engagement in the current online social media landscape of many young people, characterised by short video platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. This project builds on the current literature surrounding the use of comics for conveying health information by critically evaluating whether the addition of motion improves reach and retention among young people.

Watch this space, we will update this page with findings and outputs throughout 2024.