Estimates from the second National Survey of Psychosis conducted in March 2010 suggest almost 64,000 people have a psychotic illness and are in contact with public specialised mental health services each year. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that over $6 billion per annum is spent on mental health-related services in Australia.
There is no doubt my colleagues in the health service, whose job it is to service people with mental health illness, are under great pressure and do the best job they can with the resources they have. However, too many people are falling through the cracks and non-government community centres, police, and family and friends are picking up the pieces, with little expertise or support to do so.
Recently, a state-wide one-stop phone number for people who are having a mental health episode, or for those helping this person, was launched, which is supposed to be a gateway to the correct service. However, having personally tried this for a client, I soon realised that I still had to call several numbers and speak to several people and emergency services over the course of a couple of hours to get a positive response. We are all vulnerable to experience mental ill health in our lives and likely to know someone who is suffering. We need to campaign for better, more accessible, more responsive care and treatment, and a mental health service that can respond at any time of day or night.
In our centre (The Factory Community Centre) we see how the justice system has a disturbing cycle of people being imprisoned with mental health problems or substance misuse, only to be released without any support or follow-up services. In the space of a few weeks we see people, who when they were released looked fit and healthy and enthusiastic about change, coming back, having got caught up in a cycle of decline and then being returned to prison.
Community centres like ours are not funded, qualified or equipped to respond to people with severe mental health problems. Nonetheless, we find, time and time again, when service users can’t access support anywhere else, that our staff are forced to become the accidental counsellors. They then have to spend hours in frustrating advocacy to try and obtain the most appropriate response. We will always respond to those who need help, and as professional advocates we eventually win, but I do wonder how many times this happens elsewhere in the area and what happens to those who don’t have the ability to take themselves off to their local community centre to obtain assistance. If they called the number directly from home would they give up, or worse, might they harm themselves?
The Factory workers can give examples of people proactively seeking support for substance misuse who want to access detox services and it taking five days of calls to find them the assistance. I can give you examples of clients speaking to me in the street who are homeless (out of my work hours) seeking a bed for the night and spending two hours trying to find help for themselves. We can talk about the residents affected and terrified by those (albeit rare) sometimes violent persons with mental ill health and feeling powerless to get help.
The level of treatment or lack thereof for some of our most vulnerable members makes me angry – and that anger is one we should share. Community education and a whole of government approach are required now to help change what is currently a deplorable situation.
