Australia has made no progress in closing the 15 to 25-year gap in
life expectancy between those with a significant mental illness and
those without, according to a major new report on mental health reform
whose instigator has labelled recent government actions as “incompetent
and disingenuous”.
The Obsessive Hope Disorder report looking at mental health reform has found many significant failures in mental health care in Australia in the decades since two important inquiries.
The shortcomings include a failure to lift life expectancy, which the report says is “arguably the starkest indictment of our public policy failure”.
The report, released on Tuesday, found there had been no change in the life expectancy of people with significant mental health disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression or psychosis.
“The only group of Australians that have a similarly abysmal result are remote Indigenous Australians,” John Mendoza, who instigated the report, told Guardian Australia.
“We don’t have a lose the gap strategy on schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or major depression and yet these are very common in population numbers, far more common than some cancers.”
The report also found that access to care was dependent on where you live, capacity to pay, and the determination of sufferers and carers to seek it out.
Mendoza said a lack of infrastructure and investment in research into mental health meant sufferers were being left behind, particularly when compared with inroads made in other illness treatments such as breast cancer.
The Australian community and people with mental health problems had been “let down profoundly” by their government for more than a generation, Mendoza said.
Mendoza left his post as chair of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health in 2010 after the Labor government made cuts to the mental health program Better Access, and is highly critical of the actions taken by the Rudd government in its first term, and the Gillard government’s $277m funding pledge.
“Rudd in his first term of government, both in the 2008 budget and the 2009 budget actually stripped out about $280m out of the funding commitments that he inherited from the Howard government,” said Mendoza.
In the 2010 election the prime minister, Julia Gillard, vowed to make mental health a priority, committing $2.2bn.
“Almost all the commitments that they made in that election and those that they subsequently made in the 2011 budget have not actually materialised,” Mendoza said.
“We have no additional early psychosis centres, we do not have one package of flexible care for people with severe and persistent mental health problems actually in play today.
“That is gross incompetence and disingenuous in terms of making it a second-term priority. Commitment is only valid if it’s followed by action and we haven’t seen that action materialise.”
In response, a spokeswoman for Jacinta Collins, the minister for mental health and ageing, told Guardian Australia that the government’s $2.2bn investment in mental health was providing “a major boost to services” and a structure to “continue reform over the long term”.
She said: “Already, these reforms are delivering on the ground, with an expansion in Australia’s youth mental health services, a strengthening of primary care and better targeting of services to those most in need through Medicare Locals and subsidised psychological services.”
A spokesman for the shadow minister for mental health, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, told Guardian Australia they welcomed the report and that “key recommendations, such as the establishment of a mental health workforce training institute and more research into mental health, are already part of the Coalition’s policy framework for better mental health”.
The Obsessive Hope Disorder report marked 30 years since Australia moved to de-institutionalise after the 1983 report from the Richmond inquiry laid out a plan for reform and 20 years since Prof Brian Burdekin’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report documented “systemic and systematic” human rights violations against mentally ill Australians.
Mendoza said the name of the report was based on the decades of behaviour among people affected by or working in the area of mental illness.
“Over the last 30 years they have been hoping, praying, dreaming that the commitments made by successive governments, repeated over and over in successive plans in responses to inquiries … that someone would set this right, someone would fundamentally reform the mental health system,” he said.
“This is almost a disorder. One can see that we’ve been obsessively hopeful that this would happen, and hope is not a good strategy.”
SOURCE:http://www.theguardian.com
The Obsessive Hope Disorder report looking at mental health reform has found many significant failures in mental health care in Australia in the decades since two important inquiries.
The shortcomings include a failure to lift life expectancy, which the report says is “arguably the starkest indictment of our public policy failure”.
The report, released on Tuesday, found there had been no change in the life expectancy of people with significant mental health disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression or psychosis.
“The only group of Australians that have a similarly abysmal result are remote Indigenous Australians,” John Mendoza, who instigated the report, told Guardian Australia.
“We don’t have a lose the gap strategy on schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or major depression and yet these are very common in population numbers, far more common than some cancers.”
The report also found that access to care was dependent on where you live, capacity to pay, and the determination of sufferers and carers to seek it out.
Mendoza said a lack of infrastructure and investment in research into mental health meant sufferers were being left behind, particularly when compared with inroads made in other illness treatments such as breast cancer.
The Australian community and people with mental health problems had been “let down profoundly” by their government for more than a generation, Mendoza said.
Mendoza left his post as chair of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health in 2010 after the Labor government made cuts to the mental health program Better Access, and is highly critical of the actions taken by the Rudd government in its first term, and the Gillard government’s $277m funding pledge.
“Rudd in his first term of government, both in the 2008 budget and the 2009 budget actually stripped out about $280m out of the funding commitments that he inherited from the Howard government,” said Mendoza.
In the 2010 election the prime minister, Julia Gillard, vowed to make mental health a priority, committing $2.2bn.
“Almost all the commitments that they made in that election and those that they subsequently made in the 2011 budget have not actually materialised,” Mendoza said.
“We have no additional early psychosis centres, we do not have one package of flexible care for people with severe and persistent mental health problems actually in play today.
“That is gross incompetence and disingenuous in terms of making it a second-term priority. Commitment is only valid if it’s followed by action and we haven’t seen that action materialise.”
In response, a spokeswoman for Jacinta Collins, the minister for mental health and ageing, told Guardian Australia that the government’s $2.2bn investment in mental health was providing “a major boost to services” and a structure to “continue reform over the long term”.
She said: “Already, these reforms are delivering on the ground, with an expansion in Australia’s youth mental health services, a strengthening of primary care and better targeting of services to those most in need through Medicare Locals and subsidised psychological services.”
A spokesman for the shadow minister for mental health, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, told Guardian Australia they welcomed the report and that “key recommendations, such as the establishment of a mental health workforce training institute and more research into mental health, are already part of the Coalition’s policy framework for better mental health”.
The Obsessive Hope Disorder report marked 30 years since Australia moved to de-institutionalise after the 1983 report from the Richmond inquiry laid out a plan for reform and 20 years since Prof Brian Burdekin’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report documented “systemic and systematic” human rights violations against mentally ill Australians.
Mendoza said the name of the report was based on the decades of behaviour among people affected by or working in the area of mental illness.
“Over the last 30 years they have been hoping, praying, dreaming that the commitments made by successive governments, repeated over and over in successive plans in responses to inquiries … that someone would set this right, someone would fundamentally reform the mental health system,” he said.
“This is almost a disorder. One can see that we’ve been obsessively hopeful that this would happen, and hope is not a good strategy.”
SOURCE:http://www.theguardian.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment