Page 1395 - Week 04 - Thursday, 12 April 2018
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the whole area of the challenges that culturally diverse people in this city face when they need to access mental health services.
I have spoken in this place before about people with mental health problems finding the task of navigating a hopelessly complex and disconnected mental health service system in the ACT almost impossible. I have spoken about the paucity of mental health specialists in the city, especially in the fields of child and adolescent psychology and psychiatry. I have spoken about people who have had to resort to accessing expensive private treatment services. I have spoken about people so frustrated by the ACT’s mental health system that they have travelled interstate to get the treatment that they need for themselves or their family members. I have spoken about the decline in resources such as beds in the acute mental health wards. We have all heard about cases of mental health patients absconding from confinement. We have heard about cases of mental health patients suiciding out of frustration with a system that fails them.
I do not need to prosecute these matters today. The stories of constituents that underpin those matters speak for themselves. They have been in the media, they have been considered in committee hearings, and I have asked questions about them on and without notice and I have written letters about them.
Minister Rattenbury says in the Assembly, “Do not worry about it. The office for mental health will be the saviour of our mental health system.” It was reported in the Canberra Times not long ago that the wait for the office for mental health would be worth it. But it is a wait-and-see story and it has gone on for too long. Indeed, a media report of 30 November 2016 told the community that the office for mental health would be established within the first 100 days of the new Assembly. The first meeting of the Ninth Assembly happened on 31 October 2016. Add 100 days to that, and you get 8 February 2017. We are now 428 days beyond that 100-day milestone, that is, 528 days from the first meeting of the Ninth Assembly. And so much for the promise we have been told that the office for mental health will begin on 1 July.
Following the comments made by Mr Rattenbury in this place in question time today—pardon my scepticism—I suspect that the office for mental health will be delayed even further. In any case, no-one knows what will happen to it during the restructuring of the directorate. The minister himself has admitted that.
If you are a person who is new to Australia, whose English is scant at best, who perhaps will not have ready access to interpreter services, who does not know how the health and mental health systems work in this country; if you are a person whose culture or faith is a barrier; if you are completely alone, with no personal or family support networks; if you are someone who is unable to describe how you are feeling and what your symptoms are; if you are struggling to explain the symptoms of your child who is suffering severe depression because of bullying at school, how will you get the mental health services you or your child need when those services are so disconnected, so tied up in bureaucratic processes, so bogged down in a one-size-fits-all treatment program, and all the while you are fighting for a place in a resource-poor service that sometimes does not even exist?
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