Mental health’s strain

ADULTS in crisis are waiting a year to see overwhelmed clinicians while children are waiting up to 18 months, increasing the risk of self-harm and suicide as people are left to fall through the cracks of Queensland’s fractured mental health system.

Queensland’s emergency departments have had almost 66,000 mental health presentations in a year - the second highest in the country behind NSW - and there has been a shocking 44 per cent rise in children aged zero to four years old attending with mental health-related problems.

Mental health professionals in the public system are spending only a quarter of their time seeing patients, while the rate of ambulance attendances per 100,000 population in Queensland in 2020 for suicidal ideation was 130.9 - the highest in the country.

Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Queensland chair Professor Brett said Covid had “taken a system near the brink and pushed it over” and “services are now to the point where they don’t function”.

“Services are on the brink, people are not getting the treatment they need and the longer it goes on the more chronic people become,” Professor Emmerson said.

“The (state) government has been unwilling to commit any money to mental health.”

Queensland’s Mental Health Commissioner Ivan Frkovic said the average wait for a private psychologist was six months “because books are full”.

But a child psychiatrist or specialist paediatrician could take up to 18 months because there were so few trained.

“Even if you’ve got private health insurance or you’ve got the capacity to pay, you’re still going to struggle to get in,” Mr Frkovic said.

People could seek help at a Headspace in the meantime, but there is a wait of up to three months there too, he said.

AMA Queensland president Professor Chris Perry said long wait times were worsening the possibility of self harm.

“If an adolescent is threatening suicide you can’t get into an adolescent psychologist in under four months, and that is a lot of time they can do themselves harm in,” he said.

Experts say inadequate state and federal funding, a shortage of trained professionals, low Medicare rebates, a lack of preventive care and choked-up emergency departments are all contributing to a mental health crisis.

Meanwhile, mental health professionals in Queensland’s public system are spending only a quarter of their time seeing patients, with the rest of their time “with reams of paperwork”, according to a Productivity Commission probe.

Experts say a review is needed to determine a Commonwealth funding shortfall, which experts want poured into services in the community to help millions of Queenslanders who are falling through the cracks, known as the “missing middle” because they are too sick for GP care and not sick enough for hospital care.