Late last year, my partner and I toured a local Catholic primary school in Adelaide’s southern suburbs. We were shown its “wellbeing” wing, which looked – and sounded, thanks to the gentle muzak drifting down from overhead speakers – more like the lobby of an expensive day spa. “We’re very proud of our holistic approach to students’ wellbeing,” the principal gushed. “Our approach is based on sound evidence and we use The Resilience Project.”
Many parents of school-aged children are acquainted with The Resilience Project, but I only knew it then as the title of a bestselling self-help book written by a former schoolteacher who coached at a cricket club I’d briefly played for – Hugh van Cuylenburg.
That weekend, my partner and I had another parent-couple over for lunch and a playdate, and I took the opportunity to express my incredulity at a primary school that uses a self-help book as the basis of its wellbeing program.
“I love Hugh’s podcast,” the mother said. It’s called The Imperfects, I later learnt, and features van Cuylenburg, his younger brother Josh and comedian Ryan Shelton interviewing a range of very successful guests – sportspeople, actors, writers, chefs, comedians, musicians – about challenges they’ve (mostly) overcome.
I was soon viewing promotional reels for The Resilience Project online. “We have to teach kids how to read, write and do maths. We have to teach kids how to behave. In this day and age, we have to teach kids how to be resilient.” The speaker is the principal of a state primary school in regional Queensland, on The Resilience Project’s YouTube channel. “[TRP’s] looked at the science behind it, the psychology behind it.”
“It” is our century’s mental health buzzword – resilience. The “project” aims to teach students, teachers and parents (and others) practices to improve their ability to bounce back, to recover, to cope with adversity or stressful experiences, through the regular practise of three principles: gratitude, empathy and mindfulness, or “GEM”. Its lesson plans for each school-year level, from kindy to Year 12, suggest GEM activities. Students pull random prompt cards from GEM “chat jars” that ask questions such as: “What did someone do to help you at school today?” They’re encouraged to write “gratitude letters” to people in their lives. They’re encouraged to consciously scan their environment for positives, for instance, three specific things that made them laugh during recess. There’s the “Oxytocin Kindness Challenge”, public displays that celebrate positive behaviour, roleplays that encourage perspective-taking, “Mindful Movement” worksheets, grounding methods, breathing exercises, student journals and activities to encourage what The Resilience Project calls “emotional literacy”. There are no traditional assessments. Rather, student progress is evaluated through tracking wellbeing scores via surveys.
Glowing endorsements abound online – complete with testimonials from students – on the social media pages of schools around the country. A Sydney eastern suburbs private school prominently features its “GEM Wall” on its website, and another Queensland state school celebrates “GEM Day” on Facebook. A high school south of Canberra and a primary school in Victoria’s Yarra Ranges post Facebook updates featuring students praising GEM. A private school in Brisbane’s southern suburbs celebrates, with an Instagram post, a recent visit from two National Rugby League Women’s players who spoke to students about applying GEM principles in everyday life. A high school in the Adelaide hills posts on Instagram that their Year 8 and 9 students use The Resilience Project’s “wellbeing journals”.
The Resilience Project is not the only external provider of student wellbeing services and content to schools. Others include, most prominently, Smiling Mind, Peer Support and Friendly Schools – not-for-profit initiatives created by researchers or psychologists, which tend to focus on specific ages or on addressing particular issues. The Resilience Project is for-profit – van Cuylenburg, prefers “profit-for-purpose” – and its reach is the broadest of the lot. It’s also now among the biggest – by its own estimates, it’s present in more than 1100 schools. In April, the Australian Financial Review described it as an “empire”, with a brand that includes two bestselling books by van Cuylenburg and the podcast, one of the country’s most popular. Beyond schools, it sells its curriculum and presentations to corporates, governments, sporting clubs and more.
The program has vocal detractors among some teachers, principals and psychologists. One principal told me he wouldn’t buy The Resilience Project for his school “if it was the only dish on the menu”. But criticism is mostly confined to teachers’ subreddits. Hugh van Cuylenburg is now well-known as Australia’s “resilience guy”, having been given opportunity after opportunity to discuss mental health – and to sell his “project” – by obliging media outlets around the country. Very few seem to have asked him any difficult questions.
But there are questions that need asking. I contacted van Cuylenburg, his colleagues, mental health academics and advocates, and former peers, to try to understand The Resilience Project better and to get a sense of the man at the heart of this popular and lucrative empire.
As one teacher put it on Reddit, “The vibes are off, BIG TIME.”
In his mid-40s, Hugh van Cuylenburg is confident and engaging. He talks and writes amusingly about his thinning hairline and his ordinary features. His humour is self-deprecating and commercial mainstream. He played under-19 cricket for Victoria as a fast bowler, is a former teacher and was briefly the chief executive of Step Back Think, an anti-violence non-government organisation. He was a Victorian nominee for the 2026 Australian of the Year as a “mental health leader”.
Van Cuylenburg has a very well-worn narrative recounting a series of life-changing antecedent events that led to his decision to start The Resilience Project in 20212. First was “the moment everything changed”, when his younger sister, Georgia, developed an eating disorder. Until then, van Cuylenburg has said, “my life was full of joy … It was just so happy.” Then suddenly it wasn’t. Mental illness became a confronting fact of everyday life for teenaged Hugh and his family. Georgia later told them she’d been sexually abused by a stranger when she was about three years old. “Ever since Georgia was diagnosed with anorexia,” van Cuylenburg writes in his first book, The Resilience Project: Finding Happiness Through Gratitude, Empathy & Mindfulness (2019), “I have been fascinated with the question: what makes people happy?”
This experience, van Cuylenburg writes, led to his decision to do something to help other families ensure that they didn’t have endure what his went through. He enrolled in a teaching degree. “‘Just get in a position where you’re working alongside children,’ I thought. ‘Then at least you’ll be there to help if and when they have problems.’” He also studied child and adolescent mental health and pastoral care, and became a primary-school teacher at the exclusive Fintona Girls’ School, in the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn.
The next antecedent event occurred in India, where he went with his then-girlfriend, who had heritage there. She convinced him to volunteer “at a school for underprivileged children”. They began doing so in Thiksey, a Buddhist village in the Himalayas, and, while his girlfriend left after a couple of weeks when her grandmother died, van Cuylenburg stayed for more than three months. It was, he has recounted over and over again, life-changing. One night toward the end of his stay, he was “wandering the streets of the village” when he “saw something that changed my life forever. It was my little mate Stanzin” – his favourite student, who seemed to embody gratitude – “in his school uniform, getting ready to go to sleep. I went over to him and said hello. He was sleeping on the ground in basic conditions … He had a huge smile on his face.” Van Cuylenburg later thought of all the students he’d taught in Australia “who’d struggled with depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses. Why were we in the developed world so broken? Why were we in Australia, such a beautiful and privileged country, so anxious and depressed?”
He set about observing Stanzin. “I wanted to unravel what it was that made him” a “very kind person” despite his poverty. Stanzin, he says, was enthusiastic about his shoes, albeit dilapidated ones that didn’t fit properly. About the bowls of plain rice he would get for lunch. About his school’s rusted and barely functional play equipment. “Sir, look! Sir, dis!” he would shout excitedly, gesturing to whatever he was excited about. Including his friends. “Sir, dis person and dis person and dis person…”
After living in Thiksey for three months, Hugh writes, “I felt I understood why they were such a happy community. Ultimately, there were three principles they practised every day that were key to their resilient worldview and happy disposition.” Gratitude: Stanzin was grateful for what he had, not what he didn’t have. Empathy: Stanzin “felt compelled” to make “everyone in his life” feel “safe, included, special and happy”. And mindfulness: Stanzin and his classmates – indeed the entire school – practised meditation for half an hour each morning to “be in the moment”.
Van Cuylenburg returned to Australia and began teaching at SEDA College, a sports-focused secondary school he describes as being for “young people who struggled to learn in a traditional setting”. (He doesn’t mention that it’s an independent school that charges minimum fees of nearly $4000 and up to $10,000 for students enrolled in its “high performance program”.) Van Cuylenburg began incorporating what became the GEM principles into his teaching there, and completed a masters of education, which he structured around mental health and wellbeing. A former colleague from the elite private girls’ school where he’d gotten his first teaching gig, to whom he spoke about Stanzin and the Himalayan village, invited him back to speak about his experiences to his former students. “Gauging from the absolute silence in the room and the wide-eyed looks on their faces when I finished,” he writes, “they really took it in.” He also gave a talk to students at his own alma mater, Carey Baptist Grammar, in Kew, “which went down really well”.
These early presentations, and what he says was demand from teachers for a curriculum, gave him the idea for what became, after a few iterative name changes, The Resilience Project. And his efforts to get TRP off the ground became the last antecedent event, which also helpfully demonstrates the value of resilience. “It was just no after no, setback after setback and no one was interested,” van Cuylenburg told the ABC’s Australian Story in 2023. He’d left full-time teaching to launch his idea into schools, but after years of rejection he was “dangerously close to the breadline”. He was sitting in his car about to chuck it in when his phone rang. A guest speaker was a no-show at a principals’ conference in Ararat. “I’ve heard that you do talks,” the woman on the phone said. “Someone has said you give presentations. Can you get here within an hour?” During the drive there, van Cuylenburg says he made a decision: if the principals didn’t connect with the talk, “I’m done.”
By then, he’d honed his presentation so that it had what he calls “undeniable emotional impact so that the accompanying message … would stick”. He arrived and addressed 50 principals. “Within two days” of that presentation, he writes, “48 out of the 50 schools represented there asked me to give the resilience talk to their students”. And The Resilience Project was born.
“If you’re on the same drugs as the guy who runs it is you’ll love it,” says a respondent to a teachers subreddit about The Resilience Project. And there are plenty who do.
The presentation van Cuylenburg had given to the Ararat conference was the only marketing tool he used for years to sell The Resilience Project and its GEM principles to schools and education departments. By the end of 2014, he writes in The Resilience Project, it had been adopted into 500 schools – public, Catholic and independent – across the country. In other words, he created a product that met a demand. And it’s been phenomenally successful – thousands of schools have since bought it. So have AFL clubs, NRL clubs, A-League clubs, the Australian men’s cricket team, and more than a few businesses and corporates. The presentation – part anecdotal, part confessional, part inspirational, with a light, comical bent – became a stage show, which has been delivered to sold-out audiences across the country and has featured at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Van Cuylenburg’s performances at the Athenaeum Theatre in November 2022 were filmed and released on Prime Video as Hugh van Cuylenburg: GEM. Meanwhile, of course, there are the two bestselling books, including Let Go: It’s Time for Us to Let Go of Shame, Expectation and Our Addiction to Social Media (2021). And there’s The Imperfects podcast, which, by mid-2022, had reached the coveted Top 10 of the Australian Podcast Ranker, where it has mostly stayed.
“I’ll never, ever forget the feeling of shock when I arrived in this village called Thiksey,” van Cuylenburg tells his audience at the Athenaeum. “There was no running water, there was no electricity and everyone slept on the floor.” In his relaxed, conversational style, he is describing intense culture shock. He’d grown up in a world of considerable privilege. His father Richard’s family, Dutch Burghers, left Sri Lanka following the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 and settled in Melbourne. Richard grew up there, played Firsts cricket for Prahran and Melbourne University, and became a dentist. Hugh and his siblings, Georgia and Josh, were schooled at Kew’s exclusive Carey Baptist Grammar. Fintona Girls’ School, where Hugh first taught, today charges $28,000 for Year 1. He went from that to Thiksey.
“I remember looking across the desert and I was thinking to myself, How is this kid so happy?” he says, as an image of Stanzin’s smiling face appears on the big screen behind him. “I don’t understand this. There’s nothing here. Or nothing that we would consider valuable here.”
The paradox van Cuylenburg describes observing in Thiksey – poor and happy Himalayan villagers, in contrast to rich and anxious urban Australians – is well-known in the contemporary mental health literature. The “cross-national mental disorder vulnerability paradox” is the counterintuitive finding that while socioeconomic disadvantage increases mental health risks at the level of the individual, wealthy nations report higher prevalence of mental disorders and suicide. The Ladakh region – which includes Thiksey – was indeed often celebrated for its near-zero suicide rate until recently. Researchers offer various explanations for the paradox, including a simple methodological bias: people in poorer nations have lower mental health literacy, greater stigma about mental illness and no access to diagnosis and treatment, so under-reporting is rife and the pressure to “appear” happy, especially to outsiders, can be immense.
A “remote happiness paradox” has often been observed in Australia as well. Visitors to Aboriginal communities often see happy, free-range kids running in and out of crowded, fourth-world houses, and – much like van Cuylenburg – wonder why the kids they see in cities don’t seem quite so full of joy. And there are reasons for that joy that goes part and parcel with the poverty: deep cultural connectedness; communal parenting by the entire “village”; natural autonomy. Modernity doesn’t allow these conditions. In cities, kids are raised in nuclear families with good-enough parents if they’re lucky, but in detached housing that walls them off from the community around them, which in most of its traditional elements – church, clubs, local markets, neighbourhood street parties, over-the-fence chats – is in terminal decline.
The remote happiness paradox, of course, only takes us so far. Aboriginal communities, on average, suffer extraordinarily high rates of child self-harm and suicide, neglect and abuse, offending and incarceration – the continuing consequences of colonisation. Around the world, including in Himalayan India, visitors who observe what appears to them to be happiness are known to miss the realities of deep discontent.
Van Cuylenburg’s audiences often ask him how Stanzin and Thiksey have fared since he left. He’s never been back, so he doesn’t know. A quick search suggests the country’s National Human Rights Commission for the Himalayan Region is focused on mental health vulnerabilities there; the Sonam Nurboo Memorial Hospital, in Ladakh’s joint capital, Leh, only 25 kilometres from Thiksey, has a de-addiction department; and the youth wing of the Ladakh Buddhist Association organises drug prevention and rehabilitation awareness sessions in Thiksey. Despite the region’s high literacy rate, youth unemployment across Ladakh is very high, bucking a national trend.
I contacted Leh’s police station and spoke to the station house officer, Deputy Superintendent Manzoor Hussain Wani to get at least a sense of any problems there. “About 10 to 15 young people from Thiksey and Shey [another nearby village] are involved in drug peddling,” he told me. That’s significant in villages of about 400 families each. “It is a new problem in Thiksey,” Wani said. “It has occurred in the last three years. Police have been actively taking action against people involved in drugs.” I asked him what police thought about why the problem has arisen, and he said many students from the region go away to study and some bring illicit drugs back.
What does van Cuylenburg make of this? I ask him, given that he tells paying audiences about the happiness he observed in Thiksey in 2008, whether he feels a responsibility to also tell them about what might have happened there since, and refer him to Indian media reports that suggest a drug problem has emerged among young people in the Ladakh region. He writes back: “There’s no evidence that Thicksey [sic] has a drug problem. If they did I would be both shocked and devastated.”
Mine were not detailed enquiries and, without travelling there, I can’t say for sure to what extent drugs and mental illness are issues for Thiksey and its youth. But we might ask why van Cuylenburg feels he can confidently assert that it doesn’t.
As for Stanzin, van Cuylenburg writes that he received a text message from him in in June 2019, saying he’d joined the Indian Army and that he remembered Hugh fondly. Van Cuylenburg told Stanzin he “had inspired so many people” and he replied with a brief “okay” and said he’d stay in touch. Van Cuylenburg tells me he hasn’t heard from him since.
Stanzin’s name and image have now been shared with perhaps millions of Australians. Yet van Cuylenburg never obtained his informed consent to feature him in the way he has, for well over a decade, to sell speeches and products. It wasn’t necessary to identify Stanzin to tell the story of his time in Thiksey. I ask him why he did. “I did not remain in contact with him after I left,” he tells me. “Firstly, it was very inappropriate to do so, as he was a child. Also, no one had phones back then. I saw myself as telling the story of an experience I had been fortunate enough to have, including the people I met along the way. Looking back, I recognise that when you tell those stories publicly, you are also sharing parts of other people’s lives. I would approach some of those conversations and decisions differently today, particularly around what people are comfortable having shared publicly.”
Van Cuylenburg’s incuriousness seems extraordinary and betrays an absence of what might be called empathy. It is remarkable, too, that in more than a decade nobody has apparently thought to suggest to van Cuylenburg that it might be time to retire this part of his sales pitch. Stanzin’s “gratitude” for every “dis” was expressed in considerably different social and cultural contexts to that experienced by a child in an Australian city or town, raised on values of liberal aspiration and material acquisitiveness. Can the remote Buddhist village comparison be relevant for the urban Australian? Van Cuylenburg is neither anthropologist nor clinician. Nor has he been back to Thiksey since he left it in 2008. He has preferred, instead, to freeze-frame it as an idyllic Arcadia, on which he has built – and sold – a philosophy of happiness.
There are other jarring features in The Resilience Project’s sales pitch, most notably van Cuylenburg’s treatment of his sister’s story. Since about 2011, he has told the story of Georgia van Cuylenburg’s anorexia and of the sexual assault she suffered as a child, to countless students, teachers, sportspeople and other audiences. Georgia had moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to pursue acting and comedy. She has said she was unaware that her former illness was guiding her brother’s life choices, much less that he was using her story to sell a program to schools and businesses.
In 2019, Georgia finally came to see one of van Cuylenburg’s talks. “I was disappointed that he was talking to the rest of the world about how he feels about me rather than talking to me,” she told Australian Story in 2023. “Because there’d been no conversation. There was never a ‘how do you feel about this?’ or ‘do you mind?’. I was this story that hadn’t changed ever, but I’d grown and changed and healed.”
This isn’t how van Cuylenburg tells it in his first book. “I had asked Georgia if she minded that I shared her life’s nadir with strangers,” he writes. “‘If it helps someone else,’ she said, ‘I’m all for it.” I ask him about this contradiction. “She knew what I was doing, she just didn’t know the details,” van Cuylenburg tells me. So she never gave informed consent for the public use of her story? “Actually, can you keep Georgia out of this?” he asks. “I don’t want Georgia to be part of your story.”
I remind him that she is part of the story because he has made it that way.
“When I first spoke publicly about Georgia, I saw myself as sharing my own experience,” he writes to me later. “What I understand much more clearly now is that, while I was telling my experience, I was also telling part of Georgia’s story.”
The empathy gap again.
By the time Georgia appeared on Australian Story, she and van Cuylenburg had repaired their relationship, a fact she confirmed to me. In 2019, when van Cuylenburg was about to publish his first book and launch The Imperfects, he was fortunate that Georgia was prepared to work through her feelings about what he’d been doing. She provided feedback on his manuscript and tweaked the way he told her story. They reconciled in a December 2021 episode of The Imperfects called “Georgia & Hugh”. Listeners lapped it up. “I am [in] tears,” wrote one on Spotify. “What an incredibly honest, painful, sad, insightful and beautiful podcast.” The episode begins with van Cuylenburg reading to Georgia an entire chapter of his second book, and the main focus thereafter is her forgiving Hugh – for not preventing her sexual abuse when he was six, for not speaking up sooner about what he’d witnessed then, and for apparently using her story for so long without her permission.
The Imperfects has outwardly successful people airing their inner turmoil in conversation with a non-expert to normalise such conversations among listeners, interspersed with conversations with clinicians. Each episode begins with a lengthy, jokey introduction by van Cuylenburg and his co-hosts. The humour and tone are borrowed from commercial radio. (Van Cuylenburg, on contacting first guest Missy Higgins: “Then I slid into her DMs.” Ryan: “Would you, um, slide into your mum’s DMs? I don’t think you would … And that’s fine. I don’t want to. If you want to slide, you slide, baby.” Laughter.) Then there’s the interview, invariably conducted by van Cuylenburg, who inserts a lot of himself into the conversation, often to suggest GEM exercises. And then there’s a lengthy coda in which van Cuylenburg is interviewed by his co-hosts about the main interview. It’s van Cuylenburg’s show: his rules, his fans.
When it’s not, things go awry. In November 2024, Penguin Random House tapped van Cuylenburg to interview another of its authors, the British podcaster and writer Dolly Alderton, for the Melbourne leg of an Australian tour to promote her new book. The show at Hamer Hall sold out. Having paid up to $150, Alderton’s fans expected a genuine platform for her. “Dolly wasn’t asked a single intelligent question,” one who was there reported on Reddit. “I do, however, know where he [van Cuylenburg] lives, what his house is like, that said house is haunted, that he snapped his hamstring when he was a young lad but the pain of heartbreak is worse, the text thread with a girl who ghosted him still lives rent free in his mind, his WhatsApp group chat with his private school comrades is ‘Dads and Beers and Stuff’…” Audience members reportedly began yelling at van Cuylenburg to “let her speak”. For van Cuylenburg, it was another opportunity to share his anecdotes. “I think his heart is in the right place,” one Alderton fan told the Herald Sun, “he just didn’t read the room.”
In 2005, van Cuylenburg – then 25 years old – became a playing coach of the Melbourne University Cricket Club, having arrived there from Prahran four years earlier. In doing so, he followed in his father Richard’s footsteps. He was head coach for three seasons, his last – 2007-08 – culminating in the Club Championship, an accolade recognising a club’s structural health. His time there is worth examining in light of his reliance on personal experiences in developing and selling his curriculum, and its emphasis on honesty and acknowledging “imperfections”.
Van Cuylenburg made himself central to MUCC’s culture. In his first book, he writes of his stint as a professional cricketer in in Berkshire, west of London, when he was 20, during which he learnt from boozy English teammates to be “more relaxed about my attitude to cricket”. He joined MUCC a couple of years later and became its playing coach four years after that. He later told the Melbourne Leader: “my philosophy was that the boys had to love coming to cricket training, they had to love playing games, they had to love being around the club”.
And many did. Ex-players I’ve spoken to recall that the club was a very enjoyable place to be, especially under van Cuylenburg’s leadership. (I played a single season at MUCC myself, in 2006-07 – including, according to Cricket Australia’s online database records, one game in the 2nd XI with van Cuylenburg himself – before rapidly dropping down the grades. I can’t recall attending many training sessions or any social events.)
But a handful of others who played under van Cuylenburg say they remain scarred from their experiences. Some former players tell me the atmosphere or the culture van Cuylenburg led never felt “safe”. This is a minority view, but a strongly held one. A handful tell me of a “cult-like” atmosphere in which acceptance by van Cuylenburg, even more than winning games, became the players’ primary objective and the club’s organising principle. Many of MUCC’s cricketers had, like van Cuylenburg, attended elite private schools, and there was a sense among some of those who weren’t that the private schoolboys made up a kind of “inner sanctum” that was difficult or impossible to break into and seemed privileged in selections.
“There was a staggering amount of drunkenness and nakedness,” another former player tells me. “There were nude runs around the oval. There were occasional bike races around the oval in the dark. Two blokes, either clothed or unclothed, would race in opposite directions around the oval. Crashes happened.”
In these aspects, MUCC was hardly unique. Victorian Premier Cricket – indeed most cricket in Australia – was then still a white Australian institution with a drinking reputation to match. Nudity was also ubiquitous; a function of a changeroom culture bred in part by decades-old communal showers and urinals. This was before an inquiry into women and girls in sport led Victoria to adopt a set of guidelines in the mid-2010s to encourage participation by women and gender-diverse players, and made funding available to redesign changerooms with privacy in mind.
Some of the ex-MUCC players have told me there was strong peer-pressure to participate in heavy drinking. “Nothing prepared me for what I was entering,” says one former player of the prevailing culture there 20 years ago. “Drinking is a part of cricket, and I enjoy a drink,” he says, “but there was a culture of excessive drinking and ritualistic behaviour” at MUCC that felt “cult-like”.
“You’d cut the bottom out of a can of VB,” another says, “then you’d have to absolutely scream a club mantra at the top of your lungs, scull a beer upside-down and then chuck it into a bin, while the rest of the playing group was chanting and bellowing at you. If you missed, or if the song wasn’t sung with enough gusto or to everyone’s satisfaction, you’d have to do it all over again.” Several ex-players have told me of this ritual.
One recalls an interstate trip for a game against another university’s team. “It was one of my worst cricketing experiences,” he says. He describes an initiation ritual for those playing their first intervarsity match. “We got told to shave our testicles, I guess as a joke.” In the end, testicles played no part in the ritual. “But you didn’t know what’s coming,” he says. “There was a test called ‘the Cardinals’.” It’s a traditional drinking game, often called “Cardinal Puff”, which requires participants to repeat a lengthy sequence of actions in exactly the right order or be required to scull another beer. “You’re already anxious, then you have to remember all these steps. If you’re really good, you’ll get it in five or six attempts.” Most took many more than that. “Everyone ended up projectile-vomiting into a wheelie bin. I hated it. But if you played intervarsity that was the expectation.”
Then there was the nudity. Van Cuylenburg has built a brand around acknowledging our imperfections and regrets about past mistakes as a way of releasing ourselves from shame. He has written and spoken about embarrassing and shameful episodes in his own past, as a way to encourage others to share their own secrets. He recounts times he’s used nudity as humour. In his first book, he writes of turning up “completely nude” to the family dining table when he lived at home with Georgia. “Anything for laughter instead of tears. Anything to try to make my family a bit happier.” In his second book, he recalls an end-of-season footy trip to Adelaide when he was 22. Consumed with the need to lift the spirits of his teammates at 10 o’clock on the morning after most had been on an all-night bender, he took off all his clothes (except his shoes and socks) and ran past the pub where they’d congregated. He got a big laugh, but writes that he immediately regretted doing it. He’d been so “extremely embarrassed” that he’d withheld the story from his psychologist. “But it underscores the extreme pressure I felt to ‘light up a room’. It wasn’t a one-off, either. Hell, I ended up building a career out of it (performing that is, not doing nude runs).”
But former players from MUCC tell me van Cuylenburg engaged in other nude performances, while the club’s coach, which he’s never before publicly acknowledged. One ex-player tells me: “They got us into the Pavvy [the Pavilion, MUCC’s clubrooms] … and there was a time late in the evening when the whole club began chanting, and Hugh suddenly appeared, naked, and got up on a table in the middle and performed.” These were strictly players-only events. The popular Puppetry of the Penis stage show was then a decade old, and van Cuylenburg paid homage to it with his own naked performances, which multiple former players have referred to as “dick tricks”. At least once, van Cuylenburg divided the players into four groups and each had to guess how many pellets of PK chewing gum he could fit inside his foreskin. “And then he started putting in bits of chewing gum, one by one,” one ex-player recalls. “From memory he got more than 15 in there. And then he pretty much jerked the gum out of his penis into a bin.”
Former players have also described to me a performance known as “sauce on blimp”. “He would urinate while holding his penis closed until it inflated like a blimp, and then he’d put sauce on the end of it and let it go and it would explode. And sauce and piss – literally piss – would spray everywhere.”
Those who tell me they found the performances uncomfortable say they were unaware van Cuylenburg was going to give these performances until he did. “He was obviously worried about perception,” one says. “He would always say no videos, no cameras.”
The ex-players tell me episodes like those described here caused them to try to avoid player-only events. None of them quit the club immediately, though they say they experienced relief when van Cuylenburg stopped coaching after the 2007-08 Club Championship. The following year was much less successful under a new coach, who emphasised professionalism. “Hugh’s friends all revolted” against the new leadership, one ex-player tells me.
Yet some former senior players – including non-drinkers – emphatically deny there had been any pressure to drink, and effusively emphasise van Cuylenburg’s inclusive and caring leadership. People can change, as one former MUCC player – critical of van Cuylenburg’s leadership – tells me. “I wouldn’t want to be judged on some of the things I did 20 years ago. I don’t want to character-assassinate the guy.” In those two decades, van Cuylenburg has become a husband, a father and a competitive sprinter, and been diagnosed with ADHD. He also had his transformative experience in India and founded The Resilience Project.
How relevant is the MUCC debauchery to this story? As one ex-player puts it, “If you’re the coach and you’re participating, you’re endorsing it.” But it’s more than that. When van Cuylenburg has talked about MUCC, it’s been all positive. He’s presented the other exhibitionism he’s admitted to – at his family dinner table and on the Adelaide footy trip – as humiliating and born of a desire to entertain. But he’s simply airbrushed the more extreme stuff, even as he talks about his imperfections and encourages his audience to be honest about their own. In remaining silent about them, he hasn’t needed to acknowledge how others might have experienced his exhibitionism and the drinking rituals at MUCC. It’s the empathy gap again.
When I ask van Cuylenburg about the dick tricks, he ends our interview, clearly shaken. I’d told his PR people I’d ask him about his experiences while coaching MUCC, but clearly he hadn’t expected me to ask about the nude performances. As far as I know, nobody ever has. But they’re hardly a secret – at least dozens of people know about them.
“I am incredibly proud of so much of what we achieved there, but I also regret some of my behaviour from more than two decades ago,” van Cuylenburg writes later in response to my written questions. “As coach, I inherited a big drinking culture at the club and I know that I continued this culture. Being a coach also carried an additional responsibility. Looking back with the perspective I have now, there are situations where I would have led differently, communicated differently and been more conscious of the environment I was trying to create.
“While some details in your description around the puppetry of the penis are grossly untrue, it is true that over two decades ago, in a private room full of consenting adult males, I copied elements of the popular comedy act Puppetry of the Penis,” van Cuylenburg writes later. He doesn’t say which details are untrue. “My intention was only ever to make people laugh, but it absolutely makes me cringe now. If these performances made anyone feel uncomfortable I sincerely apologise from the bottom of my heart and would love the opportunity to do so, in person.”
One ex-player draws a very clear link between the coach of MUCC in 2008 and the person who launched The Resilience Project five years later. “I think he loves the attention and always did,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with promoting gratitude, empathy, mindfulness – they’re natural characteristics of someone whose heart is open. The question is: does any of it work in the package he’s selling it in, and even if it does, is it necessary for schools to use scarce resources to buy it? Hugh’s greatest ability is to find some little way of pulling everyone into his vortex – that’s a superpower. He did that at MUCC, and I have no doubt that he’s doing the same thing to the schools and clubs he talks to.
“Everyone loves a Band-Aid solution. He’s offering it. But I don’t trust him. I can’t after what I saw at MUCC.”
When van Cuylenburg returned from India, he soon began incorporating GEM activities into his lessons at SEDA College. But while he felt he was “onto something, I was pretty much flying by the seat of my pants” and had “no research to back up my instincts that these simple skills were essential for kids to become happier”. After one of his students attempted suicide and van Cuylenburg became acutely aware he’d received no training in how to respond to the student’s earlier cries for help, he enrolled in a part-time masters of education at RMIT in 2010. There, he learnt of Martin Seligman and the significance and science of gratitude.
“When I read the work of renowned American psychologist Martin Seligman,” van Cuylenburg writes in The Resilience Project, “I nearly fell off my chair. Widely known as the founder of positive psychology, Dr Seligman showed that we can, in effect, retrain our brains so we feel happier on a day-to-day basis.” Van Cuylenburg describes for his readers Seligman’s “simple technique: to write down three things that went well each day, every day, along with an explanation for why each good thing happened. It’s been shown that when human beings take time to look for and cogitate on the good things that happen to them every day, after one month our brains start scanning the world for positives rather than negatives.”
Seligman’s “positive psychology” is the idea that psychology is not just for treating people who meet diagnostic criteria for mental illness, but also for those who otherwise desire to live better, happier, more well. It proved a major turning point, and not just in the practice of clinical psychology. It was also outstanding business development: if nothing else, it ballooned the market for services by psychologists – and counsellors, life coaches, the multi-trillion-dollar “wellness” industry and, indeed, interventions such as The Resilience Project.
The Resilience Project is one of countless self-help approaches influenced by Seligman’s movement, which identified gratitude as a core pillar in his concept of emotional wellbeing, and set out tools including mindfulness and empathy. But Seligman endorses half a dozen “pillars” and “values”, and 24 “strengths”. His models, such as one he called “PERMA”, are detailed and complex. Van Cuylenburg, a non-expert, has reduced positive psychology to a trilogy of principles expressed in a simple acronym, GEM. It’s proven a marketing triumph.
The self-help, wellbeing and positive psychology industries attract significant criticism. They trade on what individuals can do to change ourselves, critics say, and ignore structural restraints or social and cultural factors that are largely beyond our capacity to influence, and for that reason they can exacerbate, rather than alleviate, symptoms of illness in some people. Rather than recognising that we might be experiencing understandable responses to job instability, discrimination or bullying, relationship stressors or the death of a loved one, “self-help” can encourage us to internalise our failure to transform their lives.
There’s another body of evidence that further warns of what is known as “toxic positivity”, describing what can happen when positive psychology concepts are either practised poorly or weaponised. The idea of gratitude – “I shouldn’t complain, I should just focus on what I have” – can be a psychologically damaging response to a genuinely crushing experience: forcing a positive spin on episodes of trauma, grief or intense disappointment can act as a form of gaslighting, because it teaches the brain to minimise rather than process. For this reason, positive psychology itself had to reform after a decade as “second-wave positive psychology”, to account for the fact that it wasn’t helping people to integrate adverse experiences.
Van Cuylenburg is largely silent on what some have branded the “dark side” of positive psychology. “I hadn’t seen that research when we started doing it,” he tells me, when I mention toxic positivity. “But I’m very, very confident about how we’re incorporating it now.”
It’s not difficult to see why employers, education departments and schools might be attracted to positive psychology curricula such as The Resilience Project. NAPLAN tests, corporate-style school and departmental leadership that seeks to avoid accountability, a growing class divide between public and private schools, digital tech overload, bullying: if these institutional sources of stress can be addressed with gratitude journals and some mindfulness exercises, then boxes can be ticked and it’s happy days.
And yet, the 21st century classroom is where society’s myriad failings present in the form of increasingly depressed, anxious and dysregulated kids, who have little influence over the structures that constrain them. My own classrooms in the 1980s and 1990s featured middle-class kids who overwhelmingly sat and learnt – because we had the capacity to do so. A generation on, and many schools are now confronted by what is regularly described as an “epidemic” of mental ill-health and challenging behaviour. The idea that schools can deliver programs and curriculum that might help young people experience less depression and anxiety, and improve their regulation, is a very attractive one. “Whole-school” interventions aim to do just this, and ideally also involve teachers and parents, so as to influence change across the entire school culture.
At the time van Cuylenburg launched The Resilience Project, in 2012, mental health and education experts had put years of work into developing an evidence-based mental health promotion framework for schools. In the 1990s, a series of national working parties and action plans arrived at an experimental national framework, MindMatters, that was initially trialled in 24 schools in 1998. It was extensively evaluated and reviewed by experts in subsequent years, and its evidence base was comprehensive and nuanced. Classroom activities focused on destigmatisation, improving self-knowledge, coping strategies aimed at building resilience, modelling (including asking for help), emotional literacy and stress management.
This is not how van Cuylenburg characterises the situation circa 2010, however. “I was trying to figure out an approach to pastoral teaching and student wellbeing on the fly,” he writes in his first book. “I asked my fellow teachers [at Fintona Girls’] what they were doing around wellbeing. The answer was pretty much nothing. I was too young and too inexperienced to take it up at a curricular level with the principal, so I just went about doing my own thing.” By the time he began his masters in 2010, presenting himself as a pioneer in developing wellbeing curriculum, MindMatters had been in schools for over a decade and had been extensively reviewed. There had been years of planning, policy work, curriculum development, implementation, evaluations and reviews, but he makes no mention of MindMatters or any other pre-existing social and emotional learning curriculum in his books.
MindMatters has since been reimagined and incorporated into the Be You framework, managed by BeyondBlue. Consultants are available to schools from advocacy organisation Early Childhood Australia and headspace, the national youth mental health foundation. It is a pioneering Australian example of what is called “social and emotional learning” interventions in schools, including substantial crossover with positive psychology. But it’s not a ready-made curriculum like The Resilience Project. Rather, it’s a framework for teachers to develop their own curriculum, a task that can take many hours of staff planning time. Off-the-shelf curricula are attractive to schools for this reason.
Cuylenburg’s contention was that GEM activities delivered in classrooms would replicate the positive social and emotional learning findings. But the evidence for that hypothesis was very thin on the ground. There were a few pioneering studies in the field of gratitude curricula that indicated positive outcomes, mainly from psychology professor Jeffrey Froh at Hofstra University in New York. Froh was enthusiastic about positive psychology. But by 2016 – well after van Cuylenburg had commenced selling The Resilience Project to schools – Froh himself co-authored a critique of the emerging research that conceded that gratitude exercises “seem to work for some people some of the time”, that “much more research is needed”, and that “some of the enthusiasm seen within positive psychology communities to focus on the immediate implementation of these interventions in a wide variety of settings may be premature”. Froh wrote that studies found gratitude interventions had no effect for well-adjusted students. They also found that while gratitude interventions might lead students to claim to feel better, they had little impact on their social behaviour. One 2011 study, published in Applied Positive Psychology, found that the common activity of writing a gratitude letter actually led to a reduction in wellbeing among non-clinically depressed people.
Mindfulness-based interventions had been “enthusiastically embraced in schools and [were] widely disseminated” by the mid-2010s, as researchers reported in Behaviour Research and Therapy in 2017, but despite some promising early studies there wasn’t much in the way of methodologically robust evaluations. Catherine Johnson, an experienced psychologist who’d completed the popular United Kingdom–based .b (or “Dot Be”) mindfulness in schools training, and had also taught its curriculum, delivered the curriculum to 500 students across four Adelaide schools as part of a trial. In the 2017 study, researchers reported that a year’s exposure to the .b curriculum did not result in any measurable reduction in depression or anxiety, or any improved wellbeing. Moreover, early mindfulness research had uncovered a risk that a small proportion of the population – in 2020, it was quantified in Acta Psychiatrica Scandanavia as 8 per cent, on average – will experience adverse consequences from practising mindfulness, especially in non-clinical settings, because some mindfulness exercises, such as meditation, can exacerbate pre-existing trauma in some people. In 2014, a meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology cautioned that universal school rollouts of mindfulness were running drastically ahead of the research.
Likewise, many studies showed the potential benefits of empathy exercises. But encouraging too much empathy – defined as literally feeling another’s pain and suffering – has long been known to lead to burnout, which is a chronic issue among carers and in caring professions such as nursing, social work and indeed teaching. As well, some bullies who possess high cognitive empathy – including sociopaths – can weaponise empathy teachings to manipulate or torment peers (and employees) more effectively. For these reasons, encouraging empathy without also improving emotional regulation skills can have negative effects. When The Resilience Project began teaching GEM in schools, it did not incorporate emotional regulation, and only began doing so in 2021, branding it GEM+EL (“emotional literacy”).
The true state of the research into GEM principles in the mid-2010s was that there were potential benefits to some students and potential risks to others, especially when – as with The Resilience Project – the principles would be introduced by non-clinicians as part of a generalised curriculum in non-clinical settings, such as classrooms. Van Cuylenburg was not an expert in positive psychology. There had been no randomised controlled trials of GEM. Van Cuylenburg never proposed to do any. The kind of mass rollout of GEM activities he undertook would have required ethics approval had he been as a research study attached to a university. He never tested his hypothesis before he rolled it out. Instead, he sold GEM – and The Resilience Project – to schools as a complete package and left its implementation largely to teachers following some initial training. It might be argued that van Cuylenburg conducted what became an enormous, uncontrolled experiment on Australian school kids – for profit. He wasn’t merely still building the plane while learning to fly it. He was selling it too.
Van Cuylenburg hotly disputes this characterisation. “It never felt like an experiment,” he tells me. I ask whether he’d considered a controlled trial. “When you’re one person?” he scoffs. “I was travelling around the country, talking to 15 schools a week. We were getting incredible anecdotal feedback. In an ideal world, sure, but it wasn’t possible. Everything I was teaching was based on my own life experience, plus what I was reading in positive psychology. Every single thing I asked people to do there was evidence to support.
“I’m a schoolteacher,” he reminds me. “I’m very conscious of what you put in front of kids.”
At first, The Resilience Project’s website cited no evidence at all. Remarkably, despite giving his Georgia/Stanzin/GEM talk at hundreds of paying schools for four years, van Cuylenburg says nobody ever asked him whether it had an evidence base. The first to ask, apparently, was a Melbourne Storm player in 2015. Instead, TRP relied on testimonials, such as this one from the then-head of student wellbeing at MacLeod College: “The kids loved it. They were completely locked in to the presentation. It was a blinder – and the emotional levels in the room were so powerful. I commend your passion and capacity to make a difference. You are changing lives!”
An emotional response to a well-honed presentation by van Cuylenburg, however, does not a sustained improvement in student wellbeing make. By early 2017, TRP was – according to its website – “helping young Australians to be mentally healthy”. By September that year, it said it delivered “emotionally engaging programs and provide evidence based, practical strategies to build resilience”. But it still didn’t cite any evidence.
In fact, by 2017 research was beginning to cast significant doubt on the effectiveness of whole-school interventions to promote student mental health and wellbeing. It’s well known that most mental illness – depression, anxiety, psychosis – emerges during adolescence. Renowned mental health expert Professor Patrick McGorry and two colleagues issued a warning, in Early Intervention in Psychiatry, citing the evidence to date, that “this approach” – mental health-promotion curriculum aimed at all students – “is failing to show an impact on the development of mental illness” in individual students. Evidence supported, rather, “pre-emptive or early treatment” by mental health professionals in schools to target “young people already exhibiting clinical symptoms” of mental illness. Put another way: to treat mental illness effectively, individuals must be treated by mental health professionals.
Enter the universities. During the past decade, three universities have made evaluations, of a kind, of The Resilience Project, and TRP has made much of them in its marketing. But there are significant issues with all three.
Between 2017 and 2019, TRP “commissioned the University of Melbourne to conduct an independent evaluation of the program and the behavioural changes achieved in relation to gratitude, empathy and mindfulness”. That’s what is stated on an online fact sheet produced by Product Dynamics, a printing company that for the last decade has also exclusively published TRP’s resources. The fact sheet – which TRP’s website describes as the “full report” of the study – is the only public record of that research, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed or published.
Researchers in Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health surveyed 544 children at six primary schools that had implemented the program and compared those results with surveys of 469 children at six schools that hadn’t. The children were surveyed before the program commenced, a month after the program’s initial presentation and at the end of the school year. Researchers also interviewed teachers and parents, and conducted focus groups. They found that children at program schools reported “significantly higher use of gratitude strategies”; teachers reported that “the program helped to create a kinder school environment”; “several students experienced the benefits of practising mindfulness regularly”; and teachers and students reported a “compelling” improvement in emotional literacy. In other words: no concrete results, but participants seemed to feel good about it. TRP confirmed with the researchers that its statements were accurate before publishing them. There are no claims on the fact sheet that participation in TRP actually improved students’ mental health, but TRP cited it as the first evidence of its program’s effectiveness.
The origins of the fact sheet are worth scrutiny. Professor Lisa Gibbs, the lead researcher, tells me via email that, wanting to initiate an evaluation of an existing program, she contacted The Resilience Project, and that after external funding plans were unsuccessful, TRP committed to pay for it itself. But I learn more of the story from Gibbs’ colleague in the School of Population and Global Health, Professor Rob Moodie, Victorian Father of the Year in 2005. One of Moodie’s children is Penny, the author of a memoir about her obsessive-compulsive disorder, who, since 2017, has been married Hugh van Cuylenburg.
“He said to me, ‘You need to get some kind of evaluation,’” van Cuylenburg tells me, referring to Moodie, his father-in-law. “He introduced me to Lisa Gibbs.” Moodie confirmed via email to me that he had introduced them after Gibbs mentioned interest in a study. In other words, the school in which van Cuylenburg’s father-in-law is a star professor accepted a commission from TRP to provide an “independent” evaluation of its GEM curriculum. And at the time that Gibbs and her colleagues were conducting their independent evaluation, Moodie was listed as an “adviser” to TRP on its website, and Penny was employed as its “community partnerships” manager.
Gibbs describes it as serendipity that she spoke to Moodie about her interest in evaluating a school-based program such as TRP and learnt that van Cuylenburg was his son-in-law, and that he could put them in contact with one another.
The Monthly is not suggesting improper conduct by anyone at the School of Population and Global Health, but research literature cautions about an inherent “sponsorship bias” in commissioned research. The fact sheet is silent about the connection. Moodie “wasn’t involved in the data collection, data analysis or reporting so there was no reason to identify him in any outputs,” Gibbs tells me. I ask Moodie whether he has a view about whether the connection should have been made clear to anyone reading the research, but don’t get a response.
Resilient Youth Australia is another “profit-for-purpose” company that works with schools and governments to deliver “validated student resilience surveys”. Students at more than 800 schools participate in RYA’s annual “resilience surveys”, which are collated and analysed by Adelaide University’s WiLDlab – its Wellbeing in Learning & Development Laboratory – to produce annual “state of the nation” reports. Those reports reflect the ongoing conversations about the prevalence of mental ill-health in Australian schools.
WiLDlab’s director is psychologist Dr Mark Kohler, who I speak with via email and phone. “The Resilience Project is one of their biggest clients, if not their biggest,” Kohler tells me. The Victorian education department’s website says the RYA surveys provide a “detailed wellbeing profile of each school”, but the surveys are completely anonymous and confidential – so they don’t inform schools which particular students are struggling.
“The Resilience Project really didn’t have an evidence base,” Kohler says. “We had an inkling that it was interested in building one, but didn’t know how to go about it. I worked with RYA as a way of showing The Resilience Project the value of a proper, rigorous, ridgy-didge trial. And maybe they’d then fund us to do it.”
In 2022, Kohler pulled together the RYA survey data from all the schools that participated in TRP for the previous three years – more than 83,000 students – and compared them with nearly 80,000 surveys of students from non-participating schools. Kohler’s study period – 2019-21 – covered the Covid-19 lockdown years, and, at the beginning of that period students at TRP-participating primary schools reported higher levels of depressive symptoms than students at other primary schools. “This is likely due to schools with higher negative behaviours opting to undertake the [TRP] program as an early-intervention program,” Kohler and his colleagues suggested, though he confirms with me this was speculation.
When they analysed student surveys over the next couple of Covid years, they found that students at non-TRP schools reported increased symptoms of depression and anxiety and a decrease in life satisfaction. Students at TRP schools, however, reported no increase in depression or anxiety, and an increase in life satisfaction.
“Keep in mind that these reports are preliminary only,” Kohler says. “The intention was to use existing retrospective data to get an idea of whether any group differences were apparent, as a way to justify a better controlled prospective trial.” But the trial never eventuated. TRP simply published Kohler’s preliminary reports on its website and touted them as the second evaluation showing its effectiveness. “They loved it. It was meant as an internal document, but then we saw Hugh with a little video on his website talking about our preliminary study,” says Kohler. “We kind of thought, hang on. In the end they were a bit shy about jumping to a full trial. We thought they’d have the funds, but perhaps they didn’t – a large trial is a significant investment.”
I ask Kohler whether there are clear explanations for the results he got. “There could be many possible reasons for changes in reported wellbeing as a result of a program more broadly,” Kohler says. “To understand the basis for any change requires more rigorous prospective controlled trials.”
Enter Roshini Balasooriya Lekamge, a young doctor pursuing a PhD through Melbourne’s Monash University in “improving whole-school approaches to promoting mental health and preventing risk behaviours in Australian secondary schools” – TRP’s core ground. Last year, Balasooriya Lekamge lead-authored a meta-analysis of studies involving participants aged 12 to 18, which evaluated the effects of whole-school interventions on substance use, mental disorders, bullying, aggression, “positive mental health” and mental health literacy. Balasooriya Lekamge’s team found 28 studies that met those criteria, including nine from Australia. (None of those studies evaluated TRP.) They found evidence that whole-school interventions are effective when they’re aimed at reducing regular smoking, cyber-bullying and cyber-aggression. “However,” Balasooriya Lekamge and her colleagues wrote in their conclusion, “no significant difference was found between the trial groups” for improvements in alcohol and drug use, mental disorders or positive mental health.
Then, with her colleagues at Monash’s School of Public Health and Preventative Medicine, Balasooriya Lekamge had her own opportunity to evaluate TRP after her supervisor, psychiatrist Leo Chen, approached the organisation. Balasooriya Lekamge and her research team number-crunched RYA surveys completed in 2023, in a manner similar to the way Kohler had earlier. But in this study – a data-sharing agreement not commissioned or paid for by TRP – they sub-categorised the surveys according to the length of time the schools had implemented the program. The researchers found that students at secondary schools that had implemented TRP for six or more years showed significant positive outcomes when compared with both non-participating schools (47 per cent lower odds for depression and 34 per cent lower odds for anxiety) and schools that had implemented TRP for less time. Overall life satisfaction among students at participating schools was higher; they were more hopeful; they had better coping skills. Students at schools that had implemented the program for four to five years only showed significantly lower odds for depression. And students at schools that had engaged with TRP for less time showed no significant difference in outcomes. Balasooriya Lekamge’s team concluded: “adolescents receiving The Resilience Project School Partnership Program demonstrated consistently better mental health outcomes than the control group, provided that schools had invested in the programme in the long term”.
Wonderfully for TRP, this suggested that to really help their students, schools needed to not just buy in, but subscribe for at least six years. The finding was published last March in BPsych – the peer-reviewed British Journal of Psychiatry’s online version, which isn’t paywalled – and then picked up by The Age in May. TRP then approached Balasooriya Lekamge to shoot a video explaining the study’s outcomes in conversation with van Cuylenburg. Neither Balasooriya Lekamge nor Monash were paid for her appearance, though the video, prominent on TRP’s website, presents almost like an infomercial. In it, van Cuylenburg describes Balasooriya Lekamge as “maybe my favourite person in the world right now”. The main message delivered by “Dr Roshini” is that schools “really need to invest long-term” in TRP.
What’s not discussed in the video is the fact that the Monash study didn’t assess baselines. Whether any particular student achieved better wellbeing as a result of TRP’s interventions “is really hard to say based on this study alone”, Balasooriya Lekamge concedes when she speaks to me. Nor does the video discuss any of the study’s other limitations, including its lack of randomisation, and whether there were students who did notcomplete the surveys.
Troubled by the absence of baseline and individualised data, I put a scenario to Balasooriya Lekamge. Imagine a population of four students. One has a diagnosable mental illness and reports very low scores on the survey scales. The other three have high scores before commencing TRP’s interventions. If engaging with TRP further improves those three students’ scores but has no effect on the unwell student’s scores, then the population-level data will show an overall improvement in resilience measures – despite doing nothing for the student who needs the most help.
“I’m working in child and youth mental health at the Alfred [Hospital],” Balasooriya Lekamge concedes, “and for kids with diagnosable mental illnesses, a universal intervention alone is probably not going to cut it.”
On the other hand, Kohler posits that TRP’s intervention might be most effective for that student who is most unwell. “The point is that we just don’t know,” he says. “[T]hink about how long a student is at school. By Year 6, you’re dealing with a completely different cohort of students.”
“It can be unreasonable to expect all children to respond in the same way,” Balasooriya Lekamge says. “Everyone is up against different challenges. Their hurdles are very different.” For students with diagnosable illnesses, she echoes McGorry et al’s warning: they need extra supports, including specialist mental health services. “But it’s not an either/or,” she says. “Both sectors” – specialist services and universalist interveners – “need to be working together.”
“The fact that [the Monash study] saw an improvement suggests the need for further study,” Kohler tells me. “That would be hard work. You’d need to control for many factors. Year zero would start now.”
Despite the Monash findings, it’s still the case that, well into the second decade of TRP’s rollout in schools, nobody knows how engaging with the curriculum affects individual students. Students who have suffered significant trauma; students who are very unwell. Nobody knows, either, how those effects are influenced by the quality of the curriculum’s implementation, or the extent to which teachers who implement it are cynical (perhaps because they know something of the “dark side” of positive psychology) or just burnt out. GEM+EL might be helping the kids who need the most help. Or it might be gaslighting them. Nobody knows. Not least of all TRP, whose website claims that it “builds resilience and positive mental health”. And it has three university evaluations to prove it.
Schools are desperate for pre-packaged wellbeing curriculum. Hundreds of schools bought The Resilience Project before any evidence base was presented on its website. Thousands more have done so since cherry-picked “evidence” was added.
It has also benefited from ringing endorsements from independent sources. The Educator, “Australia’s only magazine and news website for the most senior educational professionals and decision makers”, carried a puff piece about van Cuylenburg – under the heading “From school captain to mental health champion” – that had originally appeared as a “news” item on the website of his own secondary school, Carey Baptist Grammar School, after it awarded him its coveted Carey Medal in early 2024. The ABC has repeatedly featured van Cuylenburg – on Australian Story, on multiple spots on Radio National and local radio, on its website – providing him with platform after platform to tell his story and sell TRP his preferred way, without disclosing that the ABC’s corporate division has previously paid for van Cuylenburg’s presentation. This is not to mention the countless puff pieces that have appeared in newspapers and on commercial TV and radio: “Van Cuylenburg talks to Good Weekend senior writer Konrad Marshall about the twists and turns in his own life, the lessons he wants to impart to others and why he loves a good long run.”
The Resilience Project is itself enjoying a remarkably good long run in schools. In part, such success is owed to a lot of public money being offered to providers of wellbeing programs, including for-profit initiatives such as TRP.
Victoria’s royal commission into its mental health system, which ran for two Covid-affected years from the beginning of 2019, recommended that the state government make additional funding available to schools to “select the most appropriate suite” of social and emotional wellbeing initiatives for them. The resulting Schools Mental Health Fund provides for public schools to purchase a range of programs, from whole-school approaches to individualised support for students, from a range of service providers including non-government organisations, universities and for-profit companies such as The Resilience Project. The providers apply every three years to be included on the fund’s approved list.
Similar lists have since been created by education departments in New South Wales and South Australia, but those states don’t provide any additional funding for schools. The Victorian fund, however, makes nearly a quarter of a billion dollars available to government schools over four years to purchase such programs.
And in February 2023, the federal government made another half a billion dollars available for all schools in Australia – that is, including private schools – to purchase wellbeing programs from external providers. This replaces the Howard government’s school chaplaincy program, and equates to about $20,000 for each school. In practice, this means – especially outside Victoria – schools are often forced to choose between a whole-school program such as TRP or having a registered psychologist onsite to treat students with diagnosed mental illnesses. TRP is expensive – a school of 400 students would pay about $14,000 each year (excluding add-ons) – but it’s much cheaper than a psychologist for even one or two days a week.
“Schools are really busy environments and timetabling is really complicated,” a secondary school teacher, who prefers not to be identified, tells me. “Often, it’s just easier for schools to book a guest speaker like Hugh van Cuylenburg, especially when you’ve heard from colleagues that he’s going to be engaging for the kids, or to pick a slickly marketed program off the shelf.”
The Imperfects podcast devoted an episode (title: “Dis Works”) in July last year to the Monash findings. Van Cuylenburg says it was a “longitudinal” study (it wasn’t). He says it was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (“I don’t really know what that is, but it sounds really cool”). He quotes its headline findings but doesn’t discuss the study’s significant limitations. The episode does, however, feature an extended discussion between van Cuylenburg and Shelton on how they might pronounce the name of one of Balasooriya Lekamge’s co-authors and supervisors, Dragan Ilic.
Since January 2025, The Imperfects has been presented on Southern Cross Austereo’s LiSTNR platform, which also features commercial FM radio stations, lots of cricket and AFL commentary, and other popular podcasts including Hamish & Andy (who also feature heavily in van Cuylenburg’s universe). Mainstream commercial media in Australia imagines – and constructs – a white, middle-class suburban consumer. This is van Cuylenburg’s audience, and it can be seen each time the camera pans across the Athenaeum crowd during the Prime Video special. They’re not visibly diverse.
And as more than a few people have observed to me, nor are the 33 staff listed on The Resilience Project’s website (at the time of writing). That’s at least surprising in 2026, in a company headquartered in Melbourne. (“We believe there is meaningful diversity across our team,” van Cuylenburg tells me, when I put this to him, “especially in gender, as well as in age, professional experience, personal background and connection to different communities, including myself as the son of a Sri Lankan immigrant.”)
In 2001, Chilean-American psychologist Gonzalo Bacigalupe described positive psychology in American Psychologist as being “only white psychology”. It ignores wealth disparities, power dynamics and racial privilege, he wrote, and it disregards decades of research into resilience in marginalised groups. Such criticisms have never gone away and have led to a “third wave” of positive psychology with researchers investigating its applications in diverse communities.
Ultimately, van Cuylenburg owes his success to people who are prepared to accept his accounts of Georgia’s illness and Stanzin’s happiness at face value. He’s not talking to the woke set, who might be scandalised by any number of faux pas he makes, his apparent lack of awareness of gender and power dynamics, his blokiness, his reverence for elite sportsmen and preparedness to forgive their excesses. He’s speaking to a giant swathe of middle Australia that makes heroes out of sportsmen and gurus out of wellness merchants.
This doesn’t invalidate what he’s trying to do, of course. Middle Australia has significant mental health challenges and needs people who can speak to it so that it will listen. But neither does it mean GEM is appropriate for our diverse schools, nor that public money should pay for it.
More than anything else, Hugh van Cuylenburg is an entrepreneurial influencer – or an influential entrepreneur. He is Australia’s “resilience guy”. What he offers, in the end, is a religion for atheists: a religion that teaches us how to be better, reminds us of the importance of regular practice, and forgives us our imperfections.
“I expect to be judged,” he writes in his first book. And: “We are always keen to improve what we do at The Resilience Project.” It’s true that it’s made some changes, most notably to add emotional literacy to GEM. TRP also now employs a single psychologist, Verity Petratos, who completed her masters of clinical psychology in 2024.
But van Cuylenburg maintains that most sceptics and critics put aside their reservations, “especially once they’ve met me and listened to my presentation”. And for those who don’t, he relies on Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1910 speech: “It is not the critic who counts.” Van Cuylenburg paraphrases it: “If you’re going to have the courage to create something and put yourself out there, there will be people who want to have a crack at you. It’s inevitable. But if you’re not in the arena with me, fighting alongside me, I don’t care what you think.”
He does, though. Following our initial conversation, at least two approaches were made to Schwartz Media asking that this story be dropped. Van Cuylenburg denies he was behind them. I also began receiving unsolicited emails from former senior MUCC players extolling his virtues in similar-sounding defences. Van Cuylenburg also denies asking them to write to me, but he says he “is touched if they have done so”.
“Hugh is out there doing his best” to address the mental health crisis, one former senior player wrote. “[I]t makes me sad to think an article like this could negatively impact him and his work.”
And here’s the rub. “I think of all the furious debates about teaching phonics,” one teacher tells me, “but with the wellbeing stuff, we just seem to waive it through.” We're extraordinarily uncritical about the wellbeing industry. Influencers have captured the age. People everywhere establish themselves, often with few or no qualifications, on meagre or no evidence, as wellbeing coaches and practitioners. There’s big money in the mental health crisis. Corporations and government agencies fall over themselves to book popular influencers and pay their hefty fees.
I ask van Cuylenburg why The Resilience Project is for-profit. He tells me this was a lesson he’d learnt during his two years as the chief executive of the not-for-profit anti-violence campaign Step Back Think, into which he was headhunted in 2013 while he was working at Cricket Victoria. “I spent 90% of my time in that role chasing funding and grants,” he writes to me via email. “I spent 10% of my time out speaking about the issue. I was useless at getting grants and funding, so when I was setting up The Resilience Project, I wanted to set up a business that lived or died based on how good the program was, not whether I could attract funding.” But there’s no rule that prohibits not-for-profits from charging fees for programs. Being not-for-profit simply means surpluses must go back into the business instead of its owner’s pockets.
Earlier this year, van Cuylenburg engaged corporate adviser Canterbury Partners to find a buyer. He wants to expand TRP overseas, he told the Australian Financial Review, and needs capital to do it. Preliminary sale documents were circulated to interested bidders under the name “Project Gemstone”. Those documents reportedly budgeted a net profit of nearly $5 million in the 2025–26 financial year. At the time of writing, the company remains unsold.
“We’re simply having discussions with people around the country about mental health,” van Cuylenburg writes, “and advocating for what the research shows: if you practise GEM, you should feel happier.”
I ask him whether he accepts that The Resilience Project still doesn’t know how individual students respond to its expensive curriculum, and whether particular students – for instance, those with traumatic histories of their own – experience negative or even harmful reactions.
“Understanding variation in outcomes between students is an important area for the next stage of our evaluation work,” he replies. “This includes looking more closely at student-level experiences, different cohorts, implementation and whether there are unintended or adverse effects alongside the benefits identified at population level.”
Still building that plane. But he’s mastered the art of selling of it.