Alumni profile: Hiroko Fujimoto

Investigating adolescent mental health: how Hiroko began a research career from the Master of Public Health

Hiroko Fujimoto knows all about the importance of living life on her own terms, and that freedom of choice and connectedness to others, are integral to young peoples’ mental and physical health.

Hiroko, a policy research officer at the Black Dog Institute, is an alumna of UNSW’s School of Population Health. She completed her Masters of Public Health in 2023. As part of her Masters, Hiroko conducted a research project investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of adolescents. Her findings became the basis for a co-authored paper entitled: “What aspects of the pandemic had the greatest impact on adolescent mental health: duration of lockdown or subjective experience?” She completed this paper with supervisors, Associate Professor Anita Heywood from UNSW’s School of Public Health and Professor Phillip Batterham from Australian National University’s Centre of Mental Health Research, as well as other academics at the Black Dog Institute.

Hiroko says she was thrilled recently when the team’s findings were published in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health Journal.

The research found that longer lockdowns were not associated with a longer-term deterioration in mental health among Australian adolescents. It revealed, however, that adolescents who reported negative experience of the pandemic on their learning and social connections had greater mental health symptoms a year after the lockdowns were lifted, compared to those who reported that the pandemic positively affected or did not affect their learning and social connections.

Hiroko says, “this is significant because it indicates that, to protect young people’s mental health in future public health emergencies requiring lockdowns, it is vital to provide them with equitable access to essential resources for engaging with online learning, and for building and maintaining social connections.” 

Hiroko moved to Australia in 2013 from her hometown Tokyo, Japan as a 20 year old. She had been studying International Relations at a university in Tokyo for a year but found it wasn’t for her. Unsure of her path forward, Hiroko took the advice of her English teacher who suggested she visit Sydney to improve her understanding of the English language and Australian culture. 

“I came to Sydney for a short period of time during my university summer holidays, and I found I really liked being here, and the different ways that people interacted,” explains Hiroko.

“Also, I was really bored at university in Japan. People in Japan study hard to get into a university, but very few seem to get excited about learning. I found people here were keen to share ideas and learn new things, and that inspired me to move to Australia.”

For her first two years in Sydney, as she refined her English, Hiroko mulled over the direction she wanted to take professionally.

“After I moved to Australia, my English wasn’t good enough to go straight to university, so I spent a couple of years learning English and completing a bridging course, but also thinking through what I wanted to do. My parents who have always been incredibly supportive of my choices were helping support me financially and I had a part time job tutoring Japanese.” 

Hiroko says the freedom she found in Sydney, coupled with new friendships and experiences, helped her decide to enrol in, and complete, a three-year Bachelor of Health Sciences degree at The University of Sydney. 

“The main reason I chose Health Sciences – and it sounds a bit weird to say this - but when I moved away from my home and started living independently, I had a lot of freedom and options on how to structure my life in terms of diet, exercise and various activities. With the new life I established, I was feeling better and healthier,” says Hiroko.

 “This personal experience and process of engaging with health and lifestyle choices made me interested in learning more about it. I chose psychology as a major as I became particularly fascinated with learning about how mental health is integral to individuals’ health and wellbeing.” 

This interest is also what led Hiroko to the Black Dog Institute where, in 2018, she began working on the Future Proofing Study, the institute’s flagship study of adolescent mental health.

The Future Proofing Study has been collecting comprehensive mental health data from more than 6,000 adolescents every year since 2019.

Hiroko then started her Masters of Public Health at UNSW in the middle of lockdown in June 2021.

“My Master’s project used data from the Future Proofing Study and aimed to address research gaps that existed about adolescents and the pandemic lockdown. Specifically, I investigated both objectively and subjectively measured impacts of the pandemic restrictions on adolescents’ wellbeing, internalising symptoms (i.e., symptoms related to emotional and relational difficulties such as depression and anxiety), and externalising symptoms (i.e., symptoms related to behavioural difficulties e.g., hyperactivity and conduct problems) in the short- and longer-term,” says Hiroko.

Hiroko’s study analysed data from 1,000 adolescents who lived through the lockdowns in NSW and Victoria, some of the longest in the world. Counter to public concern about the toll of prolonged lockdowns on mental health, the study found that the amount of time that adolescents spent in lockdown was not associated with higher levels of internalising symptoms, and externalising symptoms; rather their negative experience of the pandemic related specifically to social connection and learning. These findings highlight the importance of young people’s subjective experiences of pandemic restrictions in relation to their mental health.

“The overarching aim of the study,” says Hiroko, “was to understand both risk and the protective factors associated with adolescents’ mental health to help future proof our young people from impending pandemics.

Hiroko recently moved to the policy research team at the Black Dog Institute where she hopes to help move the needle on getting Australian mental health policy and practice formulated, based on research evidence.

“I like working in research because we are trying to make sense of the world scientifically and to translate findings into real world changes.

“When I was visiting schools and meeting students and teachers, as part of my work on the Future Proofing Study, I learnt there is a lot of inequity in health, wellbeing and more broadly in the Australian education system. Those fundamental issues need to be addressed to improve adolescent mental health at the population level.”

Hiroko says the next step for this study is to widely communicate the findings to ensure that they can be part of an evidence-base in forming public health policy and, advocating for integrating mental health care for the next pandemic and public health emergencies.

“We should learn from what we went through and actually apply that learning to make things better for the future especially for our young people,” says Hiroko.