Mental illness the latest drag on disability support pension

Debilitating depression appears to be increasing

The government deserves credit for reining in what was out-of-control growth in the cost of the disability support pension — an extraordinary 9 per cent a year between 2008 and 2012 — but further progress will be harder.

Physical incapacity is easier to test than mental, and debilitating depression appears to be increasing, especially among young men. New forecasts show a slowing in take-up of the disability support pension, which provides a maximum $814 a fortnight (for singles) to almost 800,000 people who are unable to work. The number of new recipients with musculoskeletal impairment, also known as a sore back, fell from 32,000 in 2001 to 3500 last year.

But the number of those with psychological and intellectual conditions has surged, almost quadrupling for men in some categories. “Men under 40 with these conditions accounted for three times as many new DSP recipients than women under 40 with the same conditions,” the Parliamentary Budget Office said, noting new recipients aged under 40 had increased from 28 per cent to 40 per cent since 2001.

“As most recipients remain on the payment until they receive the age pension, this younger cohort could remain on the payment for over 20 years,” the PBO analysis added.

Even now DSP recipients are practically tenured: only 8 per cent stop receiving the pension because they either get a job or fall foul of the criteria.

Tougher testing criteria introduced by the Rudd government in 2009 — and a requirement for an independent government assessor from 2015 — slashed the projected annual growth rate in the number of DSP recipients across the next decade to 0.4 per cent, ensuring their ranks will shrink as a share of the working population.

But why the surge in mental illness among men? Renowned economist Angus Deaton has shown how middle-aged men in the US, displaced from work by technology or freer trade with China, exhibit a sharply higher incidence of mental illness.

But the job market here hasn’t changed anywhere near enough to justify the big rise in mental illness among younger men.

Perhaps rather than any innate rise in intellectual morbidity, changing social attitudes have made it easier for men in particular to admit to and seek treatment for mental illness. Yet the sort of illness required to receive the DSP is severe indeed — incapacity to work at all.

As advances in technology make work less dependent on physical dexterity, mental-health issues will loom much larger as a potential disqualifier for work.

At least those younger DSP recipients with mental-health issues have a greater potential for rehabilitation, if available treatments succeed.