Mental healthcare: it’s time to act

DR JOHN OWENS, chairman of the Mental Health Commission, is to be congratulated for the strategic plan he has written and just launched for the commission.

The plan is stunning in its simple good sense. “Services need to be user focused; needs of carers also should be fully recognised; mental health services need to be community-based, providing a range of specialised, though closely integrated, multi-disciplinary community mental health teams. Mental health services today are unsatisfactorily financed, receiving less than 7% of the health care budget. It is acknowledged that 20%-30% of all health disability is related to mental health problems.”

The trouble is that such sense seems likely to be novel to those who administer mental health services in the state and to some of the professionals who work in them.