Australia’s mental health system is in crisis, with whistleblowers warning it is overwhelmed, underfunded, and leaving people with severe illness without timely care.
The government’s own data shows 58,000 Australians have complex mental health needs, but mental health gets just five per cent of the health budget.
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On Tuesday morning’s episode of The Briefing, we sat down with the NSW Chair of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, Pramudie Gunaratne, who is calling for that to change, and for urgent systematic reform.
“This sort of one word that comes to mind… is broken. It’s really not a system, or the lack of a system,” Dr Gunaratne said.
Dr Gunaratne said that community-based mental health care has been under-resourced since asylums were closed in the 1980s and 90s.
“We don’t really have a system… it’s certainly just gotten from bad to worse as we haven’t seen any increase in that investment,” she said.
NSW government data shows 58,000 people are living with severe and complex mental illness.
Despite mental health being the second-largest burden of disease after cancer, it receives just five per cent of the national health budget.
“It’s absolutely horrible and it’s completely unacceptable that that’s the level of care that we’re able to provide.”
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