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A recent expose by ABC’s Four Corners has found that successive governments are doing as little as possible to address the collapse of mental health services in NSW.
The state still refuses to pay public psychiatrists a competitive wage that can compete with private practices – amidst serious delays, under-resourcing, and rising rates of violence.
The few psychiatrists who remain in the public sector health appear to be staying in their roles out of goodwill, and are now expected to do more with less.
NSW mental health experts have revealed to ABC journo Avani Dias that they are being forced to release unwell patients into the community due to bed shortages, causing immediate danger to the general public.
With mass resignations across the state, the NSW health department have attempted populist tactics to turn the public against ‘the whinging psychiatrists’ – as they continue to spend exorbitantly in attracting contract workers.
The state government is also required to front the bill of very costly public inquiries every time the cops have to shoot mentally unwell assailants who have been denied adequate care.
The state’s extreme cost-of-living and housing crisis is also a factor in the critical shortage of mental health experts, considering that most entry level shrinks could probably get paid more as a property manager for Ray White.
While decades of political paralysis can be pointed to as a potential cause for this crisis, the public is also starting to wonder what happened to all of those literal mental health institutions that once provided these exact services that the states are now drastically lacking.
Unfortunately, the coked-up neoliberal yuppies of Australia’s1990s political class were able to leverage progressive politics as a way to sell off these facilities, arguing that ‘community-based treatments are far more humane’
Starting with the Kennett government in Victoria, this fire-sale of rolling green lawns and heritage sandstone buildings was emulated across the nation – paving the way for luxury apartments and ‘cultural precincts’ that nobody asked for.
‘Community-based treatments’ has since been translated as the ‘unpaid labour of elderly female relatives’ – with ‘supermax jail’ being the only alternative option outside of short stays in terrifyingly underfunded public hospitals.
