Ruth Webber (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise at this late hour to speak about the report recently launched by the Mental Health Council of Australia called Time for service: solving Australia’s mental health crisis. In fact, it was launched in this building earlier this month, on 7 June. This report is in response to an earlier report issued by the Mental Health Council called Not for service: experiences of injustice and despair in mental health care in Australia and also in response to the report from the Senate Select Committee on Mental Health entitled A national approach to mental health—from crisis to community.

This report does not do what the previous two did. It does not describe the problem; it actually lays out the challenge of service delivery facing us all. The report is the culmination of a lot of hard work by the board of the Mental Health Council of Australia, including the previous chair of the council, Keith Wilson, who is not only a carer of an adult sufferer of mental illness but also a former health minister in my home state of Western Australia, and the new chair of the council, Rob Knowles, who was also a compassionate Minister for Health in Victoria when it came to the delivery of mental health services.

The report defines what we all know. It says that this is a critical time for mental health in Australia and that the pending COAG meeting presents an unprecedented opportunity for Australia to at last get it right when dealing with mental health. It defines the main indicators of the crisis currently facing us in the delivery of mental health services as follows. Twenty per cent of the Australian population will experience some form of mental illness. Having 20 per cent of our population experience that has a profound effect on our entire community. Two-thirds of people with a mental illness do not receive any treatment in any 12-month period. There is an unprecedented pressure on all parts of the mental health system, particularly access to acute care beds and access blocks in hospital emergency departments.

There is an increase in homelessness among people with a mental illness, with some reports indicating that up to 85 per cent of homeless people have a mental illness. The rates of suicide for men aged less than 75 have tripled from the 1960s. Seclusion and restraint still feature—and feature quite strongly, in my view—in our mental health system. People with a mental illness are grossly overrepresented in our prisons. Depression alone accounts for six million full work days lost per year. Less than 30 per cent of people with a disability due to mental illness participate in the Australian workforce, and that Australian experience is less than half the rate for comparable OECD countries. That is the extent of the crisis that we face in service delivery.

The other crisis that we all know about in this place—and I have done my best to highlight it because I have had to deal with it in my own community—is that of the stigma associated with people suffering from mental illness. Stigma is still a huge problem in our community because, as those of us in this place should understand more than anyone else, people fear what they do not understand. Until we come up with some solutions to combat and address that stigma, people in the wider community will never understand. We need to look at some innovative community campaigns that can achieve beneficial outcomes in reducing the stigmatisation and discrimination experienced by people with mental illness and by their families.

We need to promote good mental health and prevent the development of mental illness by emphasising strategies to help people stay mentally healthy. I know there is a good campaign to do that in regional Western Australia. We need more early intervention for people with mental illnesses by raising everyone’s awareness of the symptoms and where they can go for help. We need to promote appropriate treatment of mental illness by raising awareness of the various treatment options and how well they work. That is a small synopsis of what we can do to help address the stigma.

What we as a community really need is a commitment to collective action. The report by the Senate Select Committee on Mental Health and the report handed down earlier today by the Senate Community Affairs References Committee talked about the need for a collaborative and collective approach in dealing with some of the most challenging issues facing our society. Petrol sniffing is one of those issues; the delivery of mental health services is another. But a collective approach needs to be a real collective approach. We need to avoid apportionment of blame. The federal government need to avoid the temptation of imposing what they propose to do to address the crisis in the delivery of mental health services on the states and then defining for the states what their responsibilities are. That is not a collective agreement; that is the same old territorial blame game and war by which very little, if anything, is ever achieved.

The select committee handed down a unanimous report. It contained a very good framework for action and, in my view, some innovative recommendations. The challenge is for all governments to pick up on those recommendations and implement them. In order to address that challenge, I will be in contact with the members of the select committee in the next couple of days to hand down a challenge to them. I propose that our committee should reconvene annually, on the anniversary of the handing down of our report, to review the implementation of our recommendations and issue a report card to the nation.