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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-02-21 Daily Xml
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Mental Health Services

Ms PRATT (Frome) (15:22): I rise today to talk about mental health services and to celebrate the fantastic work of the Mentally Fit EP Wellbeing conference that was held over the weekend. I was delighted to be one of the guest speakers. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience, and it is the only one of its type in country SA. My hat goes off to women Lain Montgomerie and Emma Gale, who as part of that suicide prevention network really throw themselves into suicide prevention and awareness. I want to acknowledge the work of Merindah Ward and her ongoing commitment to supporting all the suicide prevention networks that are in South Australia—there are about 31 of them.

I also want to recognise the state's new Mental Health Commissioner, Taimi Allan, who sang to us in Maori, which was just delightful. She invited us to consider how language is used in the mental health space and how it can help and how it can harm. It is certainly something I have turned my mind to in the past in terms of questions to the minister and the OCP during estimates. We use language like the Crisis Stabilisation Unit, but if you are a consumer of that service is that really the best language? I think there are opportunities in the future to have a centralised coordination approach to navigation tools and wayfinding tools so that fewer people are distressed by how to start, and actually get access to the services that do exist.

It is not all rosy in mental health services. When we look at some of the reports that are coming out from around the nation, it is quite concerning. The statistics are confronting. Two in five Australians will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime. One quarter of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have a long-term mental health condition. Three in four children who live with a severe mental health disorder cannot get access to treatment—which means only one quarter of them can (to state the obvious), which is shocking. That is, if they live in the city, of course, because according to Health Institute data there are as few as zero psychiatrists working in rural and remote South Australia, and that is causing a big gap in mental health service delivery for communities in the bush.

In South Australia, of great concern, we know that four in 10 psychiatrists are considering leaving the profession. So, to repeat that: in South Australia, four out of 10 psychiatrists are planning in the next five years to walk away from their profession.

I think the most damning of all: a report released late last year shows that, per capita, if you live in Adelaide you have as good access to psychiatrists as if you were living in Norway and France. But without hammering this phrase I think it is important that we hang on to it: if you live in country South Australia, you are worse off than Mongolia when it comes to accessing psychiatrists.

So the plea is really going out to the government to continue looking for opportunities to increase training, to retain the workforce that we have and to improve access in regional South Australia. Of course, the greatest tragedy, and I think the most severe statistic that I can point to, is the fact that 30 per cent of our deaths by suicide are of young people aged 15 to 24.

The minister does not really have a plan or an answer to addressing the workforce challenges that we are seeing in mental health. I think that was evidenced by his answers in the house today. Across the nation Australia needs to train more than 2,200 additional psychiatrists in the next six years, and that is just to meet the minimum target set by the national mental health suicide prevention framework. There has always been a productivity argument to be made about getting a return on investment and convincing the treasurer of the day to invest more funds in mental health because there is a benefit or a hit to productivity.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists report states that mental ill health costs this country over $220 billion each year—$220 billion lost in productivity—and that is approximately $627 million a day. To frame it in another way, if he chooses, Minister Picton can meet the psychosocial needs of 19,000 South Australians living with untreated mental illness right now by finding half the state's share of $125 million a year; $500,000 in the mid-year budget is not going to cut it.

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