According to Australian of the Year Professor Patrick McGorry the federal government’s failure to aid mental health resources is a “national obscenity.” He said in an interview, “It's a national obscenity that we're neglecting this issue. We have the solutions in our hands, and we need to put them on deck tomorrow.”
His pioneer project includes the youth mental health care and early detection and management of mental ailments. He has helped to set up 30 Headspace centres around Australia that are community based, youth friendly one-stop shops for young people with mental health and substance abuse problems. There is also a specialist early psychosis prevention and intervention centre (EPPIC) in Melbourne. He says there is a requirement of 20 new centers and warns that the existing Headspace centres are already struggling in many locations, through under-investment.
These comments come as Prime Minister Julia Gillard pledged to make mental health a second-term priority if re-elected, and to set aside $277 million for suicide prevention. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has also promised $1.5 billion to fund 60 more Headspace centers, and 19 more early psychosis prevention and intervention centers around Australia.
Professor McGorry however said, “We wrote to the previous prime minister in April and we're three months down the track, another 600 Australians are dead from suicide in that timeframe, and many thousands more are becoming disabled through delayed, inadequate treatment.”
Professor John Mendoza, former chairman of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health, studied mental health services in the Mackay region last year and said that about 3,000 people would meet the criteria of suffering a severe level of disability due to mental illness. “The community here has very little capacity to respond to the needs of those 3,000 adults who have severe levels of disability. At the very best, less than a third of the people with severe mental illness get any care at all and probably only 1 to 5 per cent are getting care that's adequate for them to function as well as possible,” he said. At present there are just 18 mental health beds in Mackay Base Hospital's acute care unit, and no sub-acute beds or supported accommodation to help patients who have left the acute unit.
“None of that service infrastructure exists in Mackay and it means that those in the acute care unit are constantly seeing people discharged being readmitted within a very short period of time,” Professor Mendoza said. Mackay Health Service district CEO Kerry McGovern also said, “I acknowledge there is no transitional accommodation in Mackay, so that is one of the services that we lack in this community.” He said that the planned redevelopment of Mackay Base Hospital will provide more beds - although these beds will not be available until 2012. There is a single psychiatrist in private practice, whose waiting lists average three months. Katrina Robertson, a well-known psychologist in private practice in Mackay, says she believes the town's mental health services are “in really bad shape”.
Adelaide University Associate Professor Jon Jureidini claimed yesterday that Professor McGorry and John Mendoza had exaggerated or misrepresented mental healthcare statistics during the reform debate. But Professor McGorry and associate professor Mendoza have denied misleading anyone.
According to Mendoza, more than a third of Australians who kill themselves had been discharged too early or without care from hospitals. It is tragic that approximately 38 suicides might have been prevented, but this number is hundreds less than one-third of the 1,776 suicides in the NSW population in that period (2003-2005 inclusive). Furthermore, only 14 (12 per cent) of the 113 people had been discharged, appropriately or otherwise.
McGorry has also claimed there is a hidden waiting-list of 750,000 young Australians who are denied access to much-needed mental health services. McGorry's 750,000 claim is based on the 2007 National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing (NSMHW), which found that 671,000 (26 per cent) 16-24-year-olds experienced a mental disorder in the previous year, and only 23 per cent of them accessed treatment. McGorry's 750,000 figure, encompassing 12-25-year-olds, the focus of headspace, seems a reasonable estimate of people in that age range with untreated disorders.
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