NOWHERE TO TURN

At some point, every single Australian will experience mental ill-health or know someone who has. But an investigation by The Weekly exposes the flaws of a mental healthcare system that is under-resourced, understaffed and under-appreciated. We meet the dedicated people on the frontline struggling to save lives.

- WORDS by SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

Dr Ashwini Padhi speaks solemnly. "The system is in crisis," he tells The Weekly. He is not prone to alarmism. Dr Padhi has spent his life juggling the needs of vulnerable people, finding beds in wards where none exist, stretching human and financial resources almost to breaking point. A psychiatrist who has worked in the UK and Australia (he was until recently a Clinical Director in Mental Health for the vast Western Sydney Local Health District and is now Medical Superintendent at South Pacific Private), he has seen it all. But, he says, he has never witnessed the system buckling as it is now.

It’s buckling for myriad reasons. But prime among them is a surge in people experiencing mental ill-health – particularly younger people; especially since COVID - coupled with a system that is under-resourced, understaffed and fragmented.

In short, says another concerned psychiatrist, Dr Mark Cross, “the system is broken, not fit for purpose. We simply can’t keep going in the same business-as-usual manner.”

The human toll is immense. In the course of our investigation, The Weekly has interviewed psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health-care consumers from across the country. We’ve read first-person accounts – including coroner’s reports – of people in need who were unable to access appropriate care and of people discharged from the system into trauma, homelessness and danger.

Six years ago, Katerina Kouselas told the Victorian Royal Commission about her husband’s death by suicide three days after he was discharged from hospital. “I believe the mental health system failed him and it might be failing lots of other people we don’t know about,” she said. It is still failing people daily.