Lack of funding for mental health services in Qld putting lives at risk

Queensland’s mental health funding is appallingly inadequate and is leaving our most vulnerable without essential services when they are most in need, writes Kylie Lang.

A woman walks into a hospital – this is not one of those ‘man walks into a bar’ funnies but it’s a joke all the same – and is told there are no beds.

A chronic PTSD sufferer, she has been suicidal for days and has a documented history of trying to kill herself.

But an apologetic staffer in the overcrowded psychiatric emergency centre at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital tells her if she wants to stay, she’ll have to sleep on the floor in the corridor.

I’m not kidding. I know this because my friend is with her throughout the ordeal.

They’ve waited for five hours to be seen, forced to sit on the floor with others desperate for help because the two couches provided are full.

My friend has since contacted the hospital and offered to fundraise to buy more chairs.

Isn’t this what we pay taxes for … or are we living in a developing nation and the politicians neglected to tell us?

Queenslanders are right to be disgusted at the appalling state of mental health services.

Laughably, Queensland Health’s standard response is that there are strategies in place to ensure emergency departments and other wards are equipped to manage increased mental health presentations.

Brisbane student Bella Pearce took her own life before her 18th birthday.

Her parents Mark and Fiona Pearce, with Josh 14, have pleaded for change to the state’s broken mental health system. Picture: Liam Kidston

“Hospital and health services are working with general practitioners, non-government organisations and primary health networks to ensure mental health services are accessible,” a spokesman says.

Well, the services aren’t accessible and the “strategies” aren’t working.

It makes you wonder if anyone from government ever leaves their cushy offices to see first-hand what’s going on – or not going on, as the case invariably is.

Queensland has the lowest spend per capita on mental health in Australia.

It also, according to figures released this week, has the highest suicide rate in the country. In the Darling Downs and West Moreton Public Health Network, 21.4 people per 100,000 took their lives in 2019, compared to a national average of 13.2.

It could not be any clearer that whatever the Palaszczuk Government is doing isn’t enough.

As my friend says: “It was completely shocking to me that my very suicidal friend’s only option to stay safe was to sleep on a floor under bright lights overnight.

“We instead chose to have my friend come and stay with me for the weekend. I’m not a mental health professional, yet it became my responsibility to provide considerable amounts of crisis mental health support.

“It is incredibly upsetting to think my friend is somehow privileged to have that option; there would have been many others in the psychiatric ward that night who got sent back out into the world with no support and every opportunity to end their life.”

I learned of this latest indictment of a broken system after writing about Bella Pearce. The cherished child suicided ahead of her 18th birthday, while on a three-month wait list to see a psychiatrist and after being “fobbed off” by a Queensland Children’s Hospital mental health professional.

Following Bella’s parents’ urgent plea for change, other people came forward with their own horror stories.

Too many to mention here, but they all confirmed the inadequacy and incompetence of available services as well as the knock-on effect of suicide.

Families and friends should not have to endure lives of pain, anger and guilt (wondering what more they could have done) after the loss of a loved one.

It is the role of good government to provide essential services to its citizens, and in particular to look after the most vulnerable in our society.

Instead, our politicians are preoccupied with trying to upstage each other while critical issues go begging.

This week’s juvenile game of “gotcha” by Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath, Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick and Federal Defence Minister Peter Dutton over quarantine exemptions for Diggers is but a case in point.

While the mental health crisis demands a whole-of-community approach, it falls to our leaders to set and drive the agenda.

When politicians are more intent on keeping their jobs than doing them, we all suffer.

LOVE

■ Police officers, who are bearing the brunt of “Covidiots” refusing to do the right thing, plus taking on a range of dramas well beyond what they signed up for.

■ Finally, rules that make Facebook users liable for defamatory third party comments made under their posts after a landmark decision in the High Court. Too much hate on social media. Enough.

LOATHE

■ The Queensland government delaying the return of military personnel involved in the evacuation of Afghan refugees from Kabul … are exemptions really that hard?

■ Health workers in church-run hospitals insisting terminally ill patients must be transferred to another facility to receive their final wish of voluntary assisted dying. These patients’ suffering is great enough.

Kylie Lang is associate editor of the Courier-Mail

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