World Mental Health Day

Ms PRATT (Frome) (12:27): On behalf of the member for Schubert, I move:

That this house—

(a) acknowledges that 10 October is World Mental Health Day;

(b) acknowledges that 42.9 per cent of Australians aged 16 to 85 years have experienced a mental health disorder at some point in their life and across South Australia that equates to two in five people;

(c) acknowledges that South Australia is projected to face a shortage of psychiatrists by 2033, with a peak shortage anticipated in 2027;

(d) recognises the demand within the community for psychiatric services, highlighting the unmet need for increased mental health support;

(e) calls on the Labor government to deliver more trainee positions to deliver more capacity to our public mental health system;

(f) acknowledges that our regions experience higher rates of mental health difficulties and suicides compared to our urban areas;

(g) urges the state government to provide more funding for regional local health networks (LHNs) to employ additional consultant psychiatrists and registrars; and

(h) calls on the state government for immediate action to address the critical shortage of mental healthcare services for rural South Australians.

I rise to put forward, in the name of the member for Schubert, a motion that speaks to World Mental Health Day. I thank the member for Schubert for this motion.

On 10 October each year we mark World Mental Health Day, which is of course a day to reflect on mental health awareness and on the care our community deserves. It is alarming that two in five South Australians will experience a mental health disorder at some point in their lives. This is not a distant issue, it is not an arbitrary set of figures or statistics but something that touches our families, our friends, our neighbours. It is in our workplace and it is certainly in our regional areas.

Nationally, 42.9 per cent of Australians aged 16 to 85 have experienced a mental disorder in their lifetime. While exact state-by-state lifetime prevalence for South Australia is sometimes harder to isolate in recent reports, South Australia's data does show that mental illness remains a major contributor to illness burden. For example, emergency department data for South Australia shows that in 2023-24 the rate of mental health-related ED presentations was 119 per 10,000 population. Many of these presentations at our emergency departments are urgent where people are arriving by ambulance. In South Australia, that is about 57 per cent.

This week, we heard from the Australian Medical Association South Australian president reflecting on a recent report. The AMA did the 2025 Public Hospital Report Card: Mental Health Edition, which paints a very concerning picture about mental health wait times in our emergency departments. The median emergency department wait time for a mental health patient in our state is 10 hours. One in 10 patients wait more than 31 hours for a bed, and on some days patients in acute distress are waiting more than 35 hours in our emergency departments, which is the longest delay on mainland Australia. The AMA described the situation pretty bluntly by stating on radio this week that the emergency department is not the best place for people experiencing acute mental distress. I thank Associate Professor Peter Subramaniam, who is our state president, for his contribution on this important topic.

The patients we are referring to are often highly vulnerable, experiencing psychosis, suicidal ideation or acute trauma, and yet they are spending hours in bright, noisy, overcrowded emergency bays, sometimes under restraint or awaiting a transfer. We know that emergency departments are designed perhaps to stabilise patients and triage but certainly not to provide the therapeutic environment required for acute mental health care. It is traumatising for patients, and the workforce I would argue, it is distressing for families and it is deeply demoralising for the staff who are trying to offer that care and treatment.

When it comes to the workforce, a survey a couple of years ago—but in this term of the current government—showed that, in South Australia, about 40 per cent of our psychiatrists were considering leaving their profession within the next five years, and 69 per cent had experienced multiple symptoms of burnout. In regional South Australia the situation gets more acute. We see fewer psychiatrists per person in regional South Australia than in some developing nations.

The state government has by now released its Psychiatry Workforce Plan, in partnership with the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, to address this workforce gap. It is a 10-year plan, but I have to say that the pipeline and the regional recruitment for what we need now remains a major concern.

In recent days, if not over the last couple of weeks, we have heard from the government about announcements, rolling out election promises for more mental health beds, and they are welcome. But while the state government has opened 24 new mental health beds at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, with 24 newly announced at Noarlunga and 24 planned for Modbury, the AMA speaks very clearly on this and makes it clear that the beds that are being made available are only part of the solution. I would argue that these beds are separate to mainstream hospital inpatient beds: these dedicated mental health beds are still infrastructure that is owned by the hospital.

The fact remains that when patients who present to EDs distressed—they are assessed and admitted for short stays, which is going to be an important part of their recovery and their treatment—are discharged without community-based mental health services, in the absence of the workforce we need and the treatment services that should be available, that patient, that consumer, that person, will find themselves in a loop. Our psychiatrist workforce is certainly under extraordinary pressure. South Australia is forecast to experience a peak psychiatrist shortage by 2027, so that is in two years' time, with an overall deficit projected through to 2033.

Rural South Australia fares even worse. There are only about 19 full-time equivalent psychiatry positions covering all of our country areas. Many of those positions rely on short-term locums or visiting specialists, not permanent clinicians, which is why Dr Peter Subramaniam told ABC radio this week:

While new beds are important, the real solution is community investment. If we provide GPs and community clinicians with the right supports, we can manage the majority of mental health presentations before they ever reach our crowded EDs.

When we look at the regions and do a snapshot of communities that the opposition represents, those communities in such places as Yorke Peninsula, the Riverland, the Far North and the Limestone Coast, as well as the Mid North in my region, face high rates of psychological distress, high suicide rates and far fewer specialist services than our counterparts in metro Adelaide. The limited data that we have access to certainly highlights this disparity, but I do not need data to validate what I am told by my own community time and time again and that is either, or a combination of both, we do not have enough mental health services in regional South Australia, or they say we do not know how to find them, or both is true.

In my own electorate of Frome, which sits within the Yorke and Northern Local Health Network, the challenge is real and it is deeply felt, particularly at a time where farmers in my electorate have been hit by one or a combination of an unprecedented and unexpected tomato virus in the Adelaide Plains that has corrupted their pipeline for export and trade and closed some businesses down. We have seen frost decimate the grapegrower industry of South Australia and it is certainly deeply felt in my community where drought also impacts grapegrowers.

The drought more broadly has impacted my broadacre farming families for the better part of three years—for some it is up to eight years—and then add to that the little coastal community that we know as the Samphire Coast. Environmental factors have contributed to disrupting primary production, but it creates an anguish when their business, their livelihood, their profit margin, their ability to pay bills and invest their revenue into their children and families adds to the angst, adds to the anxiety. I see that from Eudunda to Clare and Balaklava and certainly north of my electorate in Peterborough, where a reduction in health services, a departure or a withdrawal of GP services from the local hospital compounds the uncertainty and swell of concern that families feel about where they are going to get that medical support from where it does not exist or it cannot be supported.

Local GPs, nurses and mental health clinicians in the Mid North are certainly doing incredible work and I see every day where I live in Clare my home community investing in itself. We had a fantastic mental health expo in the main street of Clare at Ennis Park just recently. I was really touched to be invited to set up a stall, to be made to feel welcome and that there was a role for me as the local member of parliament but also as the shadow minister for mental health and suicide prevention. Together we were putting forward positive messages to a rural community about what services exist, how to find them, how to navigate them, what was helpful and what people might be looking for that we can call for investment in. So there are positives to find in this space as well, but it is often because it is being led at that community level.

I continue to applaud the efforts of Lorna Woodward and her association with Lifeline Connect in Clare because Lorna understands what outreach looks like, she understands that not everyone is going to walk through the door in Blanche Street and find the services that are available and that, if we are concerned about people's wellbeing, then we need to go and find them.

We need to find them where they are. They are at sport, they are at footy, they are at bowls, they are at cricket, they are at our country shows and at their ag expos and ag bureaus, and association and socialisation needs to take place for us to start to normalise in our communities a comfort level when talking about mental illness as well as physical ailments. They are all part of the one body, to state the obvious.

Something really fabulous happened on Melbourne Cup Day that had nothing to do with South Australian jockey Jamie being the second female to win that cup, but in fact we hosted John Mannion, a former mental health commissioner and CEO and co-founder of the Breakthrough Mental Health Research Foundation.

He understood that by being invited to this event it was an opportunity to get in front of a large crowd and, while we were having fun, talk to us about how we normalise our language, how we live with mental illness, how we rely on—must rely on—evidence-based research and the investment that needs to come not just from the private sector but, he strongly suggests, from government to underpin the research that we need to validate and to back in the projects, the research, the knowledge, the expertise, the trials and the services that are important to help people be well.

I really want to thank him for coming to the Clare Valley. He has an important job to do and a stark reminder to give us, and that is that every day in Australia nine people will take their life, and seven of those nine people will be men. It is a very meaningful statistic in country South Australia and that is why investment in these services is critical.

We use this motion to call on the government to keep doing more, to invest in training placements in workforce in community-based services. With those comments, I commend the motion and I thank the member for Schubert for bringing this motion to the house.