‘Frustrating’: Government silence on vet mental health crisis

Vets are four times more likely to take their own life than other Australians. They say the profession is in crisis.

Vet Dr Joss West on her property in Trentham. Picture: Zoe Phillips

When Dr Joss West started managing veterinary clinics five years ago, she discovered a crisis unfolding behind closed doors.

“I’ve been a vet for 12 years. When I graduated, no one really talked about mental health. You were just expected to be resilient,” she said.

While managing rural clinics, Dr West found an understaffed workforce “in high pressure situations, dealing with a lot of other people’s grief, working often exceptionally long hours”.

“And if we’re perfectly blunt and honest about it, there’s not a lot of professions that have easy access, like we have, to a drug or multiple drugs that you can end your life with,” she said.

A little over a decade on from graduation, talking about anxiety and depression had become more acceptable, but suicide rates among vets had continued to climb.

Australia-wide, vets were four times more likely to take their own life than the average Australian, an industry study found last year.

In a small workforce, that meant almost every vet has known a colleague who died by suicide, she said.

Dr West is now working as a vet scientist with agricultural biological company Terragen, but is still an advocate for improving mental health outcomes for rural vets.

“We need system change. We can’t just keep doing the same things and think it’s gonna end up any different,” she said.

Dr Joss West says vets need more mental health support. Picture: Zoe Phillips

But advocates say desperate calls for government support have been met with silence.

“We have engaged with the National Suicide Prevention commissioner and the Department of Health, but unfortunately, we just haven’t got any of the support that we’ve been calling for,” Australian Veterinary Association president Dr Bronwyn Orr said.

“We’ve had a number of conversations with the Minister of Agriculture’s office. They’re very well aware of the problems and also the proposed solutions. But we’re just not getting that traction for actually taking action, which is what we need at this point.”

The AVA has called for $3 million in funding for a peer-to-peer counselling hotline for vets, based on a model they say works well in the UK. The peak body made the same request to the Morrison government before last year’s election to no avail.

Dr Orr said she was “hopeful of some engagement” from the new government, but so far had received “no support”.

The Weekly Times contacted Agriculture Minister Murray Watt’s office, who referred our query to the Assistant Minister for Mental Health Emma McBride.

The Weekly Times did not receive a response from Ms McBride in time for publication.

Dr Orr said she was concerned the mental health crisis in the profession could lead to clinics “shutting down completely”, particularly in already-understaffed regional communities.

“On the Victorian-South Australian border, (vet services are) really quite thin there. And certainly, practices in the western Victoria area, don’t have enough veterinarians.

“We would hate to have this situation where we’re sleepwalking into a crisis for the agricultural sector and rural communities where they’re not going to be able to access (vet services) anymore,” she said.