May 14, 2024 • 16 mins
Anne Hollonds was the opening speaker at the Breaking Point Digital Conference. On the podcast today you will hear an excerpt from Anne's presentation, discussing the mental health of young people around the country and what we can do to help them.
In this episode:
- Anne Hollonds - National Children’s Commissioner.
- Young people and mental health
-
Residual effects of Covid pandemic
-
Barriers to accessing mental health support for young people
-
Strong therapeutic alliance = better outcomes
-
Breaking Point Digital Conference: Unpacking the Crisis in Youth Mental Health
Related links:
- Enough: Overcoming Anxiety, Perfectionism, & Self Loathing - Happy Families
- We Need to Talk About Parent Wellbeing
- Screen Time and Our Teens’ Mental Health Crisis - Happy Families
Leave a voice memo here or email your questions/comments to podcasts@happyfamilies.com.au
Find out more about joining THE QUEST at our website
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's the Happy Families Podcast. It's the podcast for the
time poor parent who just wants answers. Now, Welcome to
the Happy Family's Podcast. My name is doctor Justin Colson
and the author of nine books about raising happy families
and the co host and parenting expert on Channelin's hit
TV show Rental Guidance. Also a dad to six kids.
(00:23):
Just recently we did something unusual, We did something a
bit different online. We conducted an online conference called Breaking Point,
very much about the state of mental health and young
people around the country and what we can do to
improve things because well, things aren't looking that great. I
was absolutely delighted and really honored to have the opening
(00:44):
speaker for our online conference. As the National Children's Commissioner
and Holland's and Hollands commenced as National Children's Commissioner in
November twenty twenty. It's a five year appointment. Before she
was appointed the role of National Children's Commissioner, she was
the direct actor of the Australian Institute of Family Studies,
which is an independent authority run by the Australian Government
(01:05):
responsible for conducting research and providing advice on child and
family wellbeing and in that role. She was also the
director of the Australian Gambling Research Center and for twenty
three years was a CEO of government non government organizations
focused on research and policy and service delivery and health
and education and social services. Has two adult daughters, three
(01:25):
grandchildren and has just done so much work MBA strategy
and leadership sessions at Harvard and Stanford Universities. We're talking
top twelve as you would expect for the National Children's
Commissioner in the online digital conference Breaking Point, and I
spoke for about an hour about so many things related
to our young people and their mental health. It was
(01:47):
a wonderful, wonderful conversation. I'm going to share with you
an extract of that in today's podcast. Let's start with
the question what is the current state of mental health
for young people?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Well, we know that even before COVID just in that
the rates of mental health issues for children and young
people had been increasing. And you know, it's hard to
remember back before the pandemic, but what was happening then
was that, you know, regularly the government was announcing more
(02:23):
and more funding for what was called youth mental health
services because of the increasing demand. But you know, I
remember thinking at the time it never seemed to be
quite enough, And of course then the pandemic hit, and
a kind of what the pandemic did was it an
amplified the broken systems out there, the fact that kids
(02:46):
weren't able to get what they needed. And we saw
during the pandemic increased rates of presentations to emergency departments
of much younger children with much more serious mental health
issues like eating disc orders and suicidality. And that was
also shown through helplines like Kids' Help Line that they
(03:08):
there was this upteap during COVID. Since COVID, of course,
we've seen that long tail of the pandemic's effect which
we all predicted for children, and that is, you know,
we've seen continued high rates of anxiety school refusal. We
just had a Senate inquiry about kids who are too
(03:29):
anxious to go to school, and also problems like eating
disorders and so forth. On the positive side, I guess
what's happened is that now the discussion about mental health
issues is much more mainstream, so we are able to
have these conversations. But unfortunately we haven't kept up with
(03:50):
the services for children and young people, and particularly I'm
concerned about services for kids twelve and under.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
And when you describe that situation, one thing that I
hear from parents time and time again is that when
it comes to this breaking point idea, they just can't
get the kids into a psychologist. It's almost impossible to
get the mental health access that they require, whether the
kids are under twelve or over twelve. It just seems
(04:20):
that waitlists are enormous. And then, of course, once you
get your child into a psychologist, if that therapeutic relationship
isn't ideal, if the child doesn't click with the psychologists,
we know from research that the stronger that therapeutic alliance,
the more likely it is that we get good outcomes
in that therapeutic context. So the kids get in, they
don't like the psychologists, and the parents says, well, I
(04:41):
can't go back to square one, because I'm going to
be eighteen months down the track before I finally find
the psychological help that my child needs. Where do you go?
Not necessarily from your view as the National Children's Commissioner,
but where do you go as a parent who is
just crumbling under this weight and desperate for their child
(05:03):
to get help? What options do they have.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Well, it's really really hard justin I mean, I've spoken
to families that have been unable to get help in
the public system for eleven and twelve year olds who
are suicidal. I mean, that is to me shocking. They
were told they were told to go find a private psychiatrist,
which you know, like we know, there's not enough of them.
(05:29):
There's not enough that are psychiatrists and psychologists that are
trained to work with children. It's like ten percent or
less have the training to work with children. But also,
of course there's the cost, so you know, it is
really hard. And I know from a personal experience in
my own family of a child that was struggling to
(05:49):
return to school after COVID, that getting helpful children with anxiety,
even in a big city, even with a family that
has all the resources available, is near impossible. And you know,
if you go out of the big cities and you're
in the regional or remote areas, you can pretty much
forget it. So you know, like it is, it's absolutely
(06:12):
a failure, I believe of our governments to leave families
in this die situation, and it is a sign that
we're not making child well being the priority it should be.
In this country. But your question was what should parents
do if they can't get their help? Well, all I
can say is just you have to keep trying. You
have to keep banging down those doors. I mean that
(06:34):
is our job as parents to get the help for
the children that they need, and you know, hopefully eventually
something will open up. Look, the other thing parents should do,
of course, is to be there for their child. Don't
underestimate your own value. Even when it comes to teenagers,
(06:56):
they do need parental, very strong parental relationships. And in
order for you to be able to help your child,
you've of course look after your own mental health and
well being, and so you know, you need to address
whatever issues you have, and it could even be things
(07:16):
like you know, as adults, we're all addicted to devices
and we have to really, I think, put a mirror
up to ourselves, and I think we need to focus
on building that very strong relationship with each child, like separately,
not children as a group. We need to know our
children so that we can be attuned to their needs
and just don't give up. Don't give up trying to
(07:39):
find that help.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And I really want to talk about the trends, especially
as they apply to social media. But a couple of
things that you've highlighted, I'd really like to go a
little deeper on those. The first that I want to
pick up on is my understanding as I've looked at
research from right around the world. My understanding is that
(08:04):
providing parenting skills and parenting tools to adults, and even
providing parents with the help that they might need not
just for their own issues but for their children's issues,
seems to be far more adaptive, far more helpful than
getting kids into therapy. I'll give you an example of
what I mean, and then I'll ask for your reaction
(08:26):
to what I'm describing. If I'm working with an eight
year old or even a thirteen year old who is
dealing with anxiety or is emotionally disregulated, has some really
big challenges, and I'm working with them at I don't know,
two o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, the likelihood of them
holding on to these skills that I've tried to practice
(08:47):
with them in a clinical setting at five point thirty
on Thursday night, when everything's going haywire is practically zero.
I mean, even most adults struggle to do that. Because
I want to get a little bit nittigritty for for
just a moment if I can. And we've been talking
about these these trends with increased mental health challenges for
(09:07):
our young people. What do you think of the central
forces that are driving these trends? If you look at
society right now, why are we where we are from
a mental health perspective?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Well, you know, I'd be very rich if I had
that answer, wouldn't I. We are all scratching our heads
about this about why, and I think it is multi
layereds Often I think though we jump to blaming social
media for the problem. Well, you know, while there are
certainly issues with social media, by the way, for adults
(09:44):
as well as children and social media addictions, I don't
think that's the whole story. And you know, I guess
it's been well articulated what some of the issues are about,
sort of the cyber bullying thing and also the the comparison,
you know, the sense of sort of my life is
(10:04):
not as good as someone else's on social media piece.
But I think it's the other thing that has I mean,
there are a lot of things that have changed the
Internet itself, putting aside, social media has allowed kids to
become more exposed to a range of things in the
world that they would previously not have been exposed to.
(10:28):
And I think it's just when I'm talking just basic
information about what's going on in the world. And it
struck me recently I heard that a big survey of
young people just recently found that the top three things
that kids are worried about there were number one was
cost of living, number two was mental health issues, and
(10:51):
number three was climate change. And I think that really
says to us as adults that you know, the idea
that kids can be protected from the you know, what's
going on around in the world, and you know that
we that they you know, we just don't talk to
them about it, just you know, they let them go
(11:13):
out and play. That doesn't work. Children these days will
know from a very early age about what's going on
in the world, and again think it puts a lot
more pressure on us as parents to be talking with
them about this, helping them to make sense of it,
because if you're just seeing you know, negative news, and
(11:33):
there's been a lot lately that we've been worried about.
Of course, if you're just sitting on your device and
streaming this that all these bad news stories on your own.
As a child, you're not able to you don't have
the maturity to put all of that in perspective. Right,
So as adults, you know, for example, we might have
(11:55):
been in shock over what happened at Bondi Junction on Saturday,
but we have some capacity to rationalize about it and
put it in some kind of context and perspective. Children
don't necessarily have that ability, and it can seem much
more catastrophic for a young person. I mean, this is
where parents really have a job to do, in my view,
(12:17):
to be able to sit down and have an open conversation,
to convey to kids that it is okay to talk
about these things and that as a parent, I also
feel sad and shocked, and I don't have all the answers,
but let's have the conversation, and I'd like to hear
what you're thinking, how did this affect you? And you know,
to open up about it, because that helps the children
(12:40):
to process the bad news. And I'm not sure that
as parents we've really understood how important our role is
in an environment where where the kids are exposed much
much earlier to a whole lot of stuff that we
didn't know about till you know, we were to anyone.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
And when I hear say that, I think that the
twenty four our news cycle has gotten to be a
contributed to the stress, especially that our older kids are experiencing.
But I can't help but think that we're creating this ourselves.
I feel like in so many ways we are our
own worst enemy. We've got the screens going all the time,
We've got the news going all the time. Our society
(13:21):
has built itself around this need to know and need
to know now your reference BONDI and the awful tragedy
that occurred there. In the days following that, I was
asked to do countless media interviews about how to talk
to the kids about it. Several of those were on
the television. I'm sure you had the same experience. And
so you're sitting in a TV studio or you're sitting
(13:43):
online watching the TV programming. And it was one thing
for me to hear about it and read about it
across the weekend. It was another thing entirely to start
watching footage that people recorded on their phones of this
of this man, what it was doing.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
The imagery, I think it gets to you more than
the word this thing.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
And now we now.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
We've got CCTV iPhone images, you know, we get everything
instantly right, and again I don't think that we've really
come to terms with what effect that has on us psychologically.
I'll tell you what happened to me on Saturday. So
I had my little grandchildren with me, five and eight,
and I saw it on my newsfeed and I made it.
(14:28):
I was really shocked. I didn't know how to process
this in the moment, and I thought, well, I'm just
not going to turn the television off. And of course
they're still quite young, so they don't have their own phone,
so they did not know about this until the next day.
And I made that decision too, that I needed time
to process what had happened as an adult first before
(14:51):
before you talking with kids about it. So, you know,
I think that we need to recognize that that that
that it is so confronting sometimes that even as adults,
but then it's going to be even more confronting and
difficult to you know, understand for children. And that's where
we as as parents come.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
In from the Happy Families Online Digital Conference breaking point
that is, the National Children's Commissioner and Holland's. You can
find more of that conversation at happy families dot com
dot you just go to the shop and look for
the Breaking Point Digital Conference. I think that you'll find
(15:35):
so much there of tremendous value. Tomorrow, on a Happy
Families podcast, we look at this week in parenting. We're
going to take a look at somebody who is arguing
that vaping could actually be good for kids, and that
we need vaping vaping rooms for our kids, and also
a new nicotine threat that is taking over schools. That
and more This Week in parenting is on the Happy
(15:56):
Families podcast tomorrow. The Happy Families Podcast is produced by
Justin Rowland from Bridge Media. Craig Bruce is our executive producer.
For more information about making your family happier, visitors at
happy families dot com dot au.
It's the Happy Families Podcast. It's the podcast for the
time poor parent who just wants answers. Now, Welcome to
the Happy Family's Podcast. My name is doctor Justin Colson
and the author of nine books about raising happy families
and the co host and parenting expert on Channelin's hit
TV show Rental Guidance. Also a dad to six kids.
(00:23):
Just recently we did something unusual, We did something a
bit different online. We conducted an online conference called Breaking Point,
very much about the state of mental health and young
people around the country and what we can do to
improve things because well, things aren't looking that great. I
was absolutely delighted and really honored to have the opening
(00:44):
speaker for our online conference. As the National Children's Commissioner
and Holland's and Hollands commenced as National Children's Commissioner in
November twenty twenty. It's a five year appointment. Before she
was appointed the role of National Children's Commissioner, she was
the direct actor of the Australian Institute of Family Studies,
which is an independent authority run by the Australian Government
(01:05):
responsible for conducting research and providing advice on child and
family wellbeing and in that role. She was also the
director of the Australian Gambling Research Center and for twenty
three years was a CEO of government non government organizations
focused on research and policy and service delivery and health
and education and social services. Has two adult daughters, three
(01:25):
grandchildren and has just done so much work MBA strategy
and leadership sessions at Harvard and Stanford Universities. We're talking
top twelve as you would expect for the National Children's
Commissioner in the online digital conference Breaking Point, and I
spoke for about an hour about so many things related
to our young people and their mental health. It was
(01:47):
a wonderful, wonderful conversation. I'm going to share with you
an extract of that in today's podcast. Let's start with
the question what is the current state of mental health
for young people?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Well, we know that even before COVID just in that
the rates of mental health issues for children and young
people had been increasing. And you know, it's hard to
remember back before the pandemic, but what was happening then
was that, you know, regularly the government was announcing more
(02:23):
and more funding for what was called youth mental health
services because of the increasing demand. But you know, I
remember thinking at the time it never seemed to be
quite enough, And of course then the pandemic hit, and
a kind of what the pandemic did was it an
amplified the broken systems out there, the fact that kids
(02:46):
weren't able to get what they needed. And we saw
during the pandemic increased rates of presentations to emergency departments
of much younger children with much more serious mental health
issues like eating disc orders and suicidality. And that was
also shown through helplines like Kids' Help Line that they
(03:08):
there was this upteap during COVID. Since COVID, of course,
we've seen that long tail of the pandemic's effect which
we all predicted for children, and that is, you know,
we've seen continued high rates of anxiety school refusal. We
just had a Senate inquiry about kids who are too
(03:29):
anxious to go to school, and also problems like eating
disorders and so forth. On the positive side, I guess
what's happened is that now the discussion about mental health
issues is much more mainstream, so we are able to
have these conversations. But unfortunately we haven't kept up with
(03:50):
the services for children and young people, and particularly I'm
concerned about services for kids twelve and under.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
And when you describe that situation, one thing that I
hear from parents time and time again is that when
it comes to this breaking point idea, they just can't
get the kids into a psychologist. It's almost impossible to
get the mental health access that they require, whether the
kids are under twelve or over twelve. It just seems
(04:20):
that waitlists are enormous. And then, of course, once you
get your child into a psychologist, if that therapeutic relationship
isn't ideal, if the child doesn't click with the psychologists,
we know from research that the stronger that therapeutic alliance,
the more likely it is that we get good outcomes
in that therapeutic context. So the kids get in, they
don't like the psychologists, and the parents says, well, I
(04:41):
can't go back to square one, because I'm going to
be eighteen months down the track before I finally find
the psychological help that my child needs. Where do you go?
Not necessarily from your view as the National Children's Commissioner,
but where do you go as a parent who is
just crumbling under this weight and desperate for their child
(05:03):
to get help? What options do they have.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Well, it's really really hard justin I mean, I've spoken
to families that have been unable to get help in
the public system for eleven and twelve year olds who
are suicidal. I mean, that is to me shocking. They
were told they were told to go find a private psychiatrist,
which you know, like we know, there's not enough of them.
(05:29):
There's not enough that are psychiatrists and psychologists that are
trained to work with children. It's like ten percent or
less have the training to work with children. But also,
of course there's the cost, so you know, it is
really hard. And I know from a personal experience in
my own family of a child that was struggling to
(05:49):
return to school after COVID, that getting helpful children with anxiety,
even in a big city, even with a family that
has all the resources available, is near impossible. And you know,
if you go out of the big cities and you're
in the regional or remote areas, you can pretty much
forget it. So you know, like it is, it's absolutely
(06:12):
a failure, I believe of our governments to leave families
in this die situation, and it is a sign that
we're not making child well being the priority it should be.
In this country. But your question was what should parents
do if they can't get their help? Well, all I
can say is just you have to keep trying. You
have to keep banging down those doors. I mean that
(06:34):
is our job as parents to get the help for
the children that they need, and you know, hopefully eventually
something will open up. Look, the other thing parents should do,
of course, is to be there for their child. Don't
underestimate your own value. Even when it comes to teenagers,
(06:56):
they do need parental, very strong parental relationships. And in
order for you to be able to help your child,
you've of course look after your own mental health and
well being, and so you know, you need to address
whatever issues you have, and it could even be things
(07:16):
like you know, as adults, we're all addicted to devices
and we have to really, I think, put a mirror
up to ourselves, and I think we need to focus
on building that very strong relationship with each child, like separately,
not children as a group. We need to know our
children so that we can be attuned to their needs
and just don't give up. Don't give up trying to
(07:39):
find that help.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And I really want to talk about the trends, especially
as they apply to social media. But a couple of
things that you've highlighted, I'd really like to go a
little deeper on those. The first that I want to
pick up on is my understanding as I've looked at
research from right around the world. My understanding is that
(08:04):
providing parenting skills and parenting tools to adults, and even
providing parents with the help that they might need not
just for their own issues but for their children's issues,
seems to be far more adaptive, far more helpful than
getting kids into therapy. I'll give you an example of
what I mean, and then I'll ask for your reaction
(08:26):
to what I'm describing. If I'm working with an eight
year old or even a thirteen year old who is
dealing with anxiety or is emotionally disregulated, has some really
big challenges, and I'm working with them at I don't know,
two o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, the likelihood of them
holding on to these skills that I've tried to practice
(08:47):
with them in a clinical setting at five point thirty
on Thursday night, when everything's going haywire is practically zero.
I mean, even most adults struggle to do that. Because
I want to get a little bit nittigritty for for
just a moment if I can. And we've been talking
about these these trends with increased mental health challenges for
(09:07):
our young people. What do you think of the central
forces that are driving these trends? If you look at
society right now, why are we where we are from
a mental health perspective?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Well, you know, I'd be very rich if I had
that answer, wouldn't I. We are all scratching our heads
about this about why, and I think it is multi
layereds Often I think though we jump to blaming social
media for the problem. Well, you know, while there are
certainly issues with social media, by the way, for adults
(09:44):
as well as children and social media addictions, I don't
think that's the whole story. And you know, I guess
it's been well articulated what some of the issues are about,
sort of the cyber bullying thing and also the the comparison,
you know, the sense of sort of my life is
(10:04):
not as good as someone else's on social media piece.
But I think it's the other thing that has I mean,
there are a lot of things that have changed the
Internet itself, putting aside, social media has allowed kids to
become more exposed to a range of things in the
world that they would previously not have been exposed to.
(10:28):
And I think it's just when I'm talking just basic
information about what's going on in the world. And it
struck me recently I heard that a big survey of
young people just recently found that the top three things
that kids are worried about there were number one was
cost of living, number two was mental health issues, and
(10:51):
number three was climate change. And I think that really
says to us as adults that you know, the idea
that kids can be protected from the you know, what's
going on around in the world, and you know that
we that they you know, we just don't talk to
them about it, just you know, they let them go
(11:13):
out and play. That doesn't work. Children these days will
know from a very early age about what's going on
in the world, and again think it puts a lot
more pressure on us as parents to be talking with
them about this, helping them to make sense of it,
because if you're just seeing you know, negative news, and
(11:33):
there's been a lot lately that we've been worried about.
Of course, if you're just sitting on your device and
streaming this that all these bad news stories on your own.
As a child, you're not able to you don't have
the maturity to put all of that in perspective. Right,
So as adults, you know, for example, we might have
(11:55):
been in shock over what happened at Bondi Junction on Saturday,
but we have some capacity to rationalize about it and
put it in some kind of context and perspective. Children
don't necessarily have that ability, and it can seem much
more catastrophic for a young person. I mean, this is
where parents really have a job to do, in my view,
(12:17):
to be able to sit down and have an open conversation,
to convey to kids that it is okay to talk
about these things and that as a parent, I also
feel sad and shocked, and I don't have all the answers,
but let's have the conversation, and I'd like to hear
what you're thinking, how did this affect you? And you know,
to open up about it, because that helps the children
(12:40):
to process the bad news. And I'm not sure that
as parents we've really understood how important our role is
in an environment where where the kids are exposed much
much earlier to a whole lot of stuff that we
didn't know about till you know, we were to anyone.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
And when I hear say that, I think that the
twenty four our news cycle has gotten to be a
contributed to the stress, especially that our older kids are experiencing.
But I can't help but think that we're creating this ourselves.
I feel like in so many ways we are our
own worst enemy. We've got the screens going all the time,
We've got the news going all the time. Our society
(13:21):
has built itself around this need to know and need
to know now your reference BONDI and the awful tragedy
that occurred there. In the days following that, I was
asked to do countless media interviews about how to talk
to the kids about it. Several of those were on
the television. I'm sure you had the same experience. And
so you're sitting in a TV studio or you're sitting
(13:43):
online watching the TV programming. And it was one thing
for me to hear about it and read about it
across the weekend. It was another thing entirely to start
watching footage that people recorded on their phones of this
of this man, what it was doing.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
The imagery, I think it gets to you more than
the word this thing.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
And now we now.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
We've got CCTV iPhone images, you know, we get everything
instantly right, and again I don't think that we've really
come to terms with what effect that has on us psychologically.
I'll tell you what happened to me on Saturday. So
I had my little grandchildren with me, five and eight,
and I saw it on my newsfeed and I made it.
(14:28):
I was really shocked. I didn't know how to process
this in the moment, and I thought, well, I'm just
not going to turn the television off. And of course
they're still quite young, so they don't have their own phone,
so they did not know about this until the next day.
And I made that decision too, that I needed time
to process what had happened as an adult first before
(14:51):
before you talking with kids about it. So, you know,
I think that we need to recognize that that that
that it is so confronting sometimes that even as adults,
but then it's going to be even more confronting and
difficult to you know, understand for children. And that's where
we as as parents come.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
In from the Happy Families Online Digital Conference breaking point
that is, the National Children's Commissioner and Holland's. You can
find more of that conversation at happy families dot com
dot you just go to the shop and look for
the Breaking Point Digital Conference. I think that you'll find
(15:35):
so much there of tremendous value. Tomorrow, on a Happy
Families podcast, we look at this week in parenting. We're
going to take a look at somebody who is arguing
that vaping could actually be good for kids, and that
we need vaping vaping rooms for our kids, and also
a new nicotine threat that is taking over schools. That
and more This Week in parenting is on the Happy
(15:56):
Families podcast tomorrow. The Happy Families Podcast is produced by
Justin Rowland from Bridge Media. Craig Bruce is our executive producer.
For more information about making your family happier, visitors at
happy families dot com dot au.
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com