As a teacher, I applaud this move and am positively thrilled that the mental health of my students is coming to the fore. There are few more pressing issues, with as many as one in four people aged 15 to 19 experiencing mental illness, and three-quarters of adult mental illnesses emerging by age 24. Suicide remains the biggest cause of death for young people.

Giving students the tools and strategies they need to weather the inevitable storms of their lives, as well as recognise when they need to enlist outside help, is an invaluable lesson.

But it fails to get to the broader issue. It does not address the societal and structural problems that create the perfect breeding ground for mental illness.

We now live within a culture of overwork. A culture where being "busy" and "working hard" and "going above and beyond" is celebrated, and where even our down time feels like it has to be productive and is judged. (Screen-time shaming, anyone?)

We force our young people through high-stakes examinations and publish league tables of their results in the newspaper (as if it's anyone's business but their own). Just last month, a leading psychologist warned of the correlation between the Victorian Certificate of Education and mental illness.

Ours is a culture of high pressure and public "accountability". And it's affecting our kids and the adults who interact with them every day - their teachers and parents.

Last week, research revealed that teachers experience anxiety and depression at significantly higher rates than the general population; over half of Australian teachers meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder, while one in five are depressed.

These are teachers whose jobs have become insurmountable and so laden with bureaucracy that they struggle to devote enough time to the work they long to do. Teachers want desperately to be able to create great lessons, inspire, support, and guide their students, and bring their subjects to life. But we must work within the realities of the clock and our own capacity. Many of us attempt to defy these realities, which contributes to our high burnout rate.

We are caught between the image of the lazy teacher who works six hours a day and gets 12 weeks holiday a year, and the martyr teacher who works from 6am to midnight every day, plus weekends and holidays, who provides lunches and supplies, and whose students leap to their desks shouting "Oh Captain, My Captain!" Trying so hard to be the latter and never viewed as the former. Teachers are chewed up and stressed out and this is rubbing off on our kids.

When teachers are flat out keeping their own heads above water, they have little left to give to their students. And then our young people go home to parents who are also stressed to the eyeballs. Parents who are working long hours, working two jobs, or who are unemployed or underemployed. Parents who are struggling with high house prices and rents in our cities, and drought in our regions.

Not to mention the everyday pressures of being engaged with their children's school and sporting clubs, and getting nutritious meals on the table in a clean house and sending them off in clean clothes (sports uniform on Wednesday, Book Week costume on Thursday, mustn't forget!)

Is it any wonder our young people are stressed out, anxious, and depressed when the adults around them are too?

Stress is contagious. Research has found that being around people who are stressed andanxious can lead to us feeling a similar stress response. And our young people are being exposed both at school and at home. A 2016 study found that having a teacher who is experiencing burnout is correlated with higher levels of cortisol, our body's stress hormone, in their students.

With such high rates of burnout, anxiety and depression in our teachers, our students can't help butsuffer.

Running programs in schools to remove the stigma and the silence around mental health is a wonderful thing to do. I have seen the power of school-based programs to transform the lives of students and change a school's culture.

But to really tackle youth mental illness and suicide rates, we also need to be addressing the mental health of their teachers and parents - the adults we charge with caring for, shaping, and protecting our young. When the broader atmosphere students live within becomes less stressful, more positive, and altogether lighter, that's when we will see a real shift in mental health for us all.