Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia is facing a mental health crisis, and young men are on the frontline. Two-thirds of men face challenges engaging with health care, 45 per cent drop out of therapy with unmet mental health needs and more than 2,400 men died by suicide in 2023, making it the leading cause of death among young men. Behind every heartbreaking statistic is someone's dad, someone's brother, someone's son or someone's colleague at work. These are people that I hear from almost every week, desperately seeking help in emergency departments, waiting for months to see a psychologist or having increasingly fraught encounters with police, where issues aren't treated and things get out of hand. These are people who are falling through the cracks in our mental health system, and we need to do more to help them. I commend the work of groups like Movember, who over many years has raised awareness about men's health issues and done incredible work to address them. I fully support Movember in this work.

The mental health challenges facing our community have only been made worse by the mass resignation of public health psychiatrists in New South Wales, where I'm from. This is likely to cause a serious disruption in the care of some of the most vulnerable people in our community and is the result of a failure over many months to resolve workforce issues in the New South Wales mental health system. I urge the New South Wales government to urgently find a solution to ensure that appropriate care is given to— (Time expired)