Fincancial crisis increases mental health crisis
Posted by eleanorreader on May 7, 2009
A transcript from radio program The Word Today on Monday May 4 has highlighted the rise of people seeking help for mental health problems as a result of the current economic climate. The Mental Health Care Council of Australia says spending on the Medicare rebate for mental health consultations has increased by 40%, meaning it has already exceeded its annual budget.
JENNIFER MACEY: Every month, psychologist Dr Leigh Hodder flies to Biloela and Emerald in regional Queensland to see patients suffering from depression and anxiety.
In the past few months she’s seen a big jump in the number of referrals from local GPs and Dr Hodder is blaming the global financial crisis that’s already led to thousands of job losses in some mining communities.
LEIGH HODDER: Particularly in the rural and remote areas because I deal with a lot of mining communities and as we know, they have shed at least 5,000 jobs up here in Queensland. You know with the farmers, when I first started seeing them it was primarily to do with the drought etc but now there is just so much financial pressure on everybody in those rural and remote areas.
I also see people in the city and their concerns are pretty much the same – redundancies, cutbacks, how are we going to pay for the groceries, how are we going to buy the kids their shoes and their books and all this sort of stuff.
So it is really hitting people quite hard.
The Mental Health Council of Australia’s CEO David Crosbie says the government has uinderestimated the costs of providing mental health through medicare.
DAVID CROSBIE: For the current financial year, the budget in the original estimate was about $108-million. What we expect the actual to be is well over $300-million – so three times as high as that and if it continues to grow the way it is, we would expect that expenditure, you know, within a couple of years will be over half a billion dollars on these three measures alone.
With the severe conditions that are in affect today it seems the Australian Government has not stepped up to meet the changing needs of the public. Jeff Cheverton, the CEO of Queensland Alliance which represents the mental health community sector in Queensland pointed out that Australia has very little health promotion compared to New Zealand and the UK. People are not being taught how to maintain their own mental health, something that may be a major detriment to Australian society in the future.
