Chief executive officer of Mental Health Australia Frank Quinlan has drawn a stark picture of what becomes of mentally-unwell people when they don’t get the support they need.
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He was in Dubbo for a meeting seeking to influence the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
“We know it to be true that they die about 20 years earlier than the rest of the community,” he said.
“That happens because they don’t get access to appropriate cardiac care. They don’t get access to appropriate medication management. They don’t get appropriate supports in employment, housing, finance and other things.”
The Mind the Gap meeting hosted by Marathon Health focused on how the needs of people with psychosocial disability could be met under the NDIS, set to be rolled out in Western NSW from July 1.
More than 50 people attended the meeting including government and NDIS representatives, clinicians, service providers and people with “lived experience of mental illness”.
Mental Health Australia reports that psychosocial disability describes the experience of people with impairments and participation restrictions resulting from mental illness.
They range from not being able to think clearly or manage emotions through to an inability to engage in educational or cultural activities.
People with psychosocial disability can have unpredictable needs, posing a challenge to the NDIS practice of establishing support packages that don’t change across a period of time.
At Friday’s meeting NDIS transition manager for Marathon Health Jessica Brown said the practice better suited people with a physical or intellectual disability that was stable.
She said meeting participants were looking at how to design a plan that delivered necessary “episodic” support for people with psychosocial disability. “We don’t want people to fall through the gaps of service delivery,” the manager said.
Ms Brown said the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS had the same intent. “We feel there’s fertile ground for providing solutions-driven approaches,” she said.
Mr Quinlan said 690,000 Australians experienced severe mental illness annually with 290,000 of them judged to be in need of “ongoing psychosocial support”. “We know that there will only be 64,000 places for people in the NDIS who have the severest psychosocial support,” he said. “We’re talking about ensuring that those people who don’t get into the NDIS continue to get adequate services and the people who do get into the scheme get appropriate packages of care.”
