A big first year ends with another big first for MDH: Guardian publication.

What a year it has been for this young blog.

 
Last October we started out as blog newbies with our piece on Male Shame, inspired by Gus Worland’s terrific show Man Up on ABC.  Gus and his show supported us on Twitter, along with luminaries like Pat McGorry, Anna Goldsworthy, Graeme Simsion, Anson Cameron, Dr Sally Cockburn, Catherine Deveny and Arne Rubinstein… and we were off to a flying start. 

Then came PND awareness week and a wonderful collaboration with Perinatal Anxiety and Depression Australia on gender equity and PND, retweeted by Clementine Ford and BeyondBlue. To finish off the trilogy on gender and mental health, there was a piece on keeping kids safe from gender warfare. 

And that was just the first two months!

In 2017 we returned with a piece on our crazy world and the sanity of babies, which was picked up by Dumbo Feather magazine, where it appeared alongside interviews with heroes of ours, people changing the world thoughtfully and with compassion. Psychscenehub, a great resource for mental health practitioners and trainees also supported MDH and ran the piece. 

Then the sane and brilliant Annabel Crabbe retweeted our next post on helping dads talk to babies, giving us a boost into the thousands of readers. Early Learning Review picked this up too, and we were really beginning to reach people more widely than we could have dreamed of back in October 2016.

The year got better still. Encouraged by our friends and colleagues to be brave, we took the plunge and wrote on Marriage Equality, a piece which was republished many times, including by the ABC and Amnesty Australia. It was supported by Twitter stars like Benjamin Law, Charlie Pickering, Peter Fitzsimmons, Van Badham and Father Bob Maguire.
 
…which gave us a springboard to aim for the next piece to run first in mainstream media. It was swinging for the bleachers, and we feared striking out, but yesterday The Guardian published our piece on connecting dads. It’s already been seen by thousands, shared and commented upon by hundreds. 

And to cap it off, our longtime hero in the Men’s Health field Steve Biddulph got behind us with a ringing endorsement on his Raising Boys Facebook page. Movember UK has since retweeted us to tens of thousands of followers. 

We write to you from Brisbane, where Matthew will be giving his first ever keynote presrnatation to an international audience tomorrow at the Marcé Society Perinatal Mental Health Conference, together with  mentor and colleague Dr Richard Fletcher. 

Our heartfelt thanks to all involved, especially family. The irony of spending time tapping at a screen and flying interstate to promote face to face relationships and family mental health is not lost on us. 

But we are just limbering  up! Writing has been just so much fun. We’ve got a sniff, and we want more. If you have ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, or any other feedback, please pipe up. 

Meanwhile, share, like and comment to support us. Ideas alone can’t change the world, but we can’t change anything without them.