7. Mental Health
Many Australians experience a mental illness at some time in their lives. Young people in particular, and others such as Indigenous people, the elderly and those living in rural areas are vulnerable to mental illness.
Several Federal Parliamentary Senate Inquiries have identified significant deficits in mental health funding and, along with the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, have pointed to the need for reform of mental health service delivery arrangements.
The current Government’s response has been inadequate. In particular, there continues to be problems with community-based mental health services. These have not been appropriately structured or funded since the Burdekin reforms that moved much of the care and treatment of people with a mental illness out of institutions and into the community. For people with serious mental illness living in the community, there is also a particular difficulty in accessing care by psychiatrists in community-based settings.
All Australians with a mental illness deserve to have ready access to quality mental health care based on their particular needs. This includes early identification, community-based outpatient care, and inpatient acute care. For those with serious mental illness, the road to recovery can be long, and can require intensive care and further community-based specialist medical treatment, as well as social support such as supported accommodation.
People are still frequently unable to access the mental health care they need, when they need it. In particular, follow-up care in the community after hospitalisation for an acute episode is often lacking.
Some opportunities for early identification and intervention for youth have been established. But there continues to be significant unmet need in mental health care and major gaps in service provision that the next Government must address as a matter of urgency.
This must include addressing the deficit of specialist community-based care. Currently, people with serious mental illness will often have to be admitted and re-admitted to the public hospital system at short notice, notwithstanding the shortage of acute care beds. This is not sustainable.
Mental health must be included as a central component in the next Government’s health agenda. The next Government must:
- Provide greater investment for, and progress the reform of, comprehensive mental health services;
- Increase capital and recurrent funding for psychiatric beds based on an analysis of the number of new psychiatric acute and sub-acute care beds required in the public hospital system as part of the AMA’s proposed stocktake of public hospital bed capacity – Bedwatch;
- Provide greater support and funding for
community-based clinical and support services for
people living in the community who have mental
illness. This should include:
- improved access to care from specialist psychiatrists in community-based settings such as private specialist rooms and community-based mental health facilities; and
- an increased number of community-based sub- acute outreach services for GPs to refer patients with a mental illness to, where appropriate.
* For a full pdf version of the Key Health Issues for the 2010 Federal Election click here
Key Health Issues for the 2010 Federal Election - Foreword – AMA President, Dr Andrew Pesce
AMA National Conference 2012
Federal Budget Submission 2012-13
Traffic Light Food Labelling - The Evidence
Poll
paediatric mental health
The biggest problem with mental health services as they are at present is that there is no provision for the commonest DSM-IV diagnosable mental illness in childhood, namely ADHD. Many of these children need stimulant medication for optimal management. These children are treated principally by paediatricians. However, in there is no recognition of the role of paediatricians and no provision for these children within the public sector. The way mental health services currently operate implies that children with ADHD will be managed either in community based and early intervention services or by the specialised mental health services. The drawbacks to this are that the community services are unable to prescribe stimulant medication and the mental health services have no capacity for meeting the demand. These children are managed by paediatricians because there is nowhere else for them to go. The lack of recognition of the role of the paediatrician means that paediatric training in this area is inadequate and therefore the care these children receive, if they are able to access a private paediatrician, is hugely variable.
re:
There are people with mild mental impairments like memory dificulties such as forgetting people's names or misplacing items. In this situation the only thing to do is to consult it to your doctor before it leads to alzheimers disease. Try to visit this site www.tryvod.com to improve memory and tips to remember what we usually forget.
It isn't only Australians
It isn't only Australians that suffer from mental health impairments. Many people in this world have mental illness. It is very important to take care of your mental health and home health. I hope that there is more medical treatment for those with mental illness in the future. It is sad to see that government isn't helping out more.
mental health
Mental health issues sometimes carry the people are afraid to go for treatment. You just know if most student health insurance companies cover mental health treatment? I hope that the stigma that goes with mental health issues go away soon so that more people can get the help they need.
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