David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk about a challenge in Australia that we aren't speaking about enough: the declining state of mental health among young people. If you talk to primary school teachers, you'll hear endless stories of the challenges that young people are facing when it comes to their mental health. The ABS National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing released in 2022 found that almost 40 per cent of young people—that's two in five people aged from 16 to 24—had experienced a mental health issue. That's up 50 per cent since 2007. The feedback I've received from mental health services is that that is probably understated. What they're seeing is an increasing trend of younger and younger people coming through their doors—sometimes as young as four years old. The Australian Psychological Society say that their members are reporting a sharp increase in anxiety disorders among children aged from 18 months to five years old and, among young people aged from 13 to 18, they are seeing a worrying increase in depression, anxiety and suicidality.

With these kinds of statistics, it's no surprise that hospital clinicians are also sounding the alarm. While an update to the official data is expected next month, clinicians are warning me that they are seeing young people coming to hospital sicker than ever before. Our system simply is not working if we are seeing an influx of people with mental illness into our hospitals. Hospitals should be and are the last port of call. They are not places to heal; they are places to be stabilised. From speaking with people in my community, the experience of people in acute mental health units can often be a traumatic one.

Most adult mental health disorders begin when people are young, often in that crucial time as people are transitioning to adulthood. Early intervention in these years can and does make a difference in the life course of people and their relationships with mental health. While we made strides in supporting mental health care in the primary system, there is still so much to do, and the system is clearly not coping.

Over the past few weeks, my team and I have been speaking with the mental health sector to understand what is going on and how we could improve the system to better support young people. From these early conversations, it's clear we are facing significant workforce challenges as well as issues with cost and accessibility. We're not training enough mental health providers, and we're also not utilising some providers to the best of their capabilities. GPs are also not funded to provide mental health care, despite this now representing one of the most common presentations from patients. General practice is also under constant financial pressure, and the current Medicare structure doesn't remunerate GPs sufficiently for them to provide mental health care. In speaking with one ACT GP, I heard how she spent hours on a weekend speaking with a patient who was in crisis and searching for a bed in an inpatient facility. Most of this time calling around facilities on a weekend was not patient-facing time, so at the end of the day, after hours and hours of work on a weekend, all she could bill was $37.

There is also clearly a missing middle in the system, a gap for people requiring more extensive early intervention in the primary care system to keep them healthy and out of hospital.

This is an issue I intend to investigate further. The risk of doing nothing or tinkering around the edges is that we lose an entire generation to mental illness and consign people to a poor quality of life. This is an area where we need to be bold for the sake of our young people and the next generation. It is on us to come up with programs and interventions to assist young people. We must focus on and invest in early intervention so we don't see people turn up to emergency and clog up the hospital system. There are many programs in our communities that are doing great work, but they struggle year to year with 12-month funding. This is something that we can and must change.