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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Thursday, 11 March 2004) . . Page.. 1100 ..

identify mental health symptoms, other than in the recent television advertising campaign about depression.

The more we make people aware of mental health the easier it will become for people to get help before the problem puts them or others at risk. The more we spend on detecting problems early the less we will have to spend on fixing the problem and often the adverse consequences later. We also need to ensure our mental health system is treated with the respect it deserves and gets sufficient funding to do the job we expect. We must look at the whole system from start to finish and make sure problems are able to be identified early, able to be treated properly and then able to be followed up on a long-term basis. Most mental health problems do not just go away like the common cold. We need to provide the mental health system with sufficient funding to ensure patients are able to get ongoing treatment where necessary.

While I have concerns with the government over the condition of our mental health system, I have to admit that it inherited the problem and also the attitudes of our community. So instead of just throwing mud let’s do something that no other jurisdiction in this country has had the courage to do. Let’s recognise that there is a problem. Let’s all look deeply at ourselves and our own attitudes to mental health. Let’s put politics aside for a short while and do something for the good of the community. If we look cynically at this there are unlikely to be a lot of votes in it for any of us so let’s just do this so that when we all leave this Assembly we can look back with pride at the achievement and the difference we made to the lives of so many people.

MS DUNDAS (4.30): I am pleased that we are having this debate about the mental health system in the ACT. Last week, when we debated the way people with suspected mental illnesses were transported to hospital for assessment, we looked at one specific issue in relation to mental health. The Assembly agreed then that it made sense to reduce the stigma and confrontation in interactions between mentally ill and the police. I hope things are starting to get better in that way. What we have seen come out of that specific debate was more discussion about the broader problems with the mental health system in the ACT. The police feel quite rightly that it shouldn’t be their problem, that they shouldn’t be the ones called upon to help people with mental illnesses. That raised questions about how the CAT team is operating, what resources are there to expand the role of the CAT team so that they can transport people from their homes and into treatment.

We have a long way to go, and I think this debate has gone a bit of that way by raising all those issues. I have been attending the forums that have been held recently—from the forum that Ms Tucker mentioned in relation to Bob’s death to the forum that Mr Smith mentioned in relation to a psychiatric care facility for people on remand. The overwhelming thing that comes out of those forums is just sheer frustration that there are so many people out there who are just tired—tired of continually getting the run around from one support service to another support service, to a different community organisation to somewhere else and still their mental illness and their mental health problems are not being treated. That is how we need to look at this. It is a health issue, and the proper treatments are not there to help many in our community.

One of the things discussed is the need to put more resources into after hospital care. We no longer discharge patients from psychiatric wards without finding out if they have

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