We all know that unfortunately mental health is not a vote winner.  The users of mental health services include people such as me who are relatively affluent and educated, but they also include some of the most marginalised and vulnerable people in our community.  It is this group of Australians who are being left out of Prime Minister Rudd’s and the state premiers’ health reform debate.  The focus is on the sexy, headline-grabbing and vote-changing issues of aged care, hospital beds, waiting times for surgery and access to physical health services.  In other words, the health package is tailored by politicians with an eye to their futures.

Yet  on June 12, 2008, when Nicola Roxon was the newly minted health minister, The Sydney Morning Herald reported her as saying:

I have a very strong view that if one thing I can achieve as health minister is to get us to talk about and focus more on … what we can do in the prevention area … what we can do to ensure that people can live happier and healthier lives for longer, then I would have achieved something very significant.

Now, less than two years later Roxon is having to defend herself against the reality that the Rudd government’s health reform package ignores mental health, and inexplicably so, given that mental health and physical health are so closely intertwined.

This is not only tragic, but scandalous.  Because as it stands, even if  Rudd gets his way with the premiers next week, nothing will change for most users of public mental health services, and particularly those in the public system.  They will still face acute-care bed shortages; a silo-like approach to services, which means that they are shunted from service provider to service provider, private hospital mental health care will still remain out of reach except for those who can afford it; and the police and correctional services will be forced to warehouse people with mental illness because they cannot secure scarce bed places in emergency wards.

Yet more than three  million Australians experience mental illness each year.  The AMA says that about one in 10 sessions a GP has with a patient is mental health-related and in 2008 the ABS found that more than two  million Australians did not access help for their mental health needs, despite them acknowledging they need to do so.

One major reason for this frightening ABS number is that there is a lack of facilities available to patients.  As Professor Vaughan Carr, a psychiatrist from the University of New South Wales and head of the Schizophrenia Research Institute, noted recently,

Psychiatric bed numbers in Australia have decreased by 80 per cent over the past 40 or so years, during which time the population of the country has doubled. Australia now has one of the lowest numbers of psychiatric beds per capita in the developed world, at about 60 per cent of the level recommended by experts.

Yet despite all this, our political leaders are not making mental health reform a key part of Australia’s healthy future.

Greg Barns lives with bipolar depression and is a regular user of the mental health system.