If you’re interested in watching the Prime Minister make a long awaited announcement on mental health, you can watch a live stream of her address to CEDA in Brisbane online.
Update: The focus of Gillard’s announcement is on suicide prevention, with $277 million committed over four years.
Update: The focus of Gillard’s announcement is on suicide prevention, with $277 million committed over four years.
Peanuts. We should stop the massive subsidies to the private health insurers and redirect the monies to rebuild community-based mental health services.
Mental health was the topic for Insight, altho I missed a fair bit of it.
One thing that did fliter on down from the likes of Dutton and co, is that they are primarily concerned with mental problems with the young- it seemed exclusionary the way it was put- as if the sanity of people over thirty needed to be a consideration at all?
Was another wedge being invoked, the deserving young victims of a godless society at the mercy of undeserving older sufferers whos problems would be no doubt down to reprobate self-infliction and no longer worthy of help?
This is a rubbish policy. Isolating suicide risk for mental health spending is akin to doing “black spot” maintenance on the Pacific Highway when in fact it needs to be made dual carriage all the way. Neither the PM not the ALP have a sufficient grasp on mental health issues which above all else needs money for highly trained staffing so that human contact, which is genuinely what heals, can be vastly increased.
Brilliant. They’ve managed to come up with a policy showing all the signs of ‘couldn’t care less but since Tones has a mental health policy we should too’.
Key mental health practitioners called this policy a “scattergun approach” today noting that it delivers on specific programs but otherwise doesn’t address years of funding neglect from government. It really does appear that the ALP just doesn’t give a shit. I don’t know who their advisers are on mental health policy but I’ll state right now that they ought to be given the arse if they couldn’t get the PM to focus on mental health issues as a total package. Beyond griping about lack of funding what really rankles is the sheer injustice of underfundsing and neglecting the immense human suffering of people with mental illness among whom, I’ll add for emphasis, is every single voter or potential voter given that the data shows that everyone will have one mental illness episode int he course of a lifetime. Fark, its a Dickensian attitude.