Young Australian men are angry, they are drinking, and they are violent. So shut the bottle shops and bars early. Cut off their booze supply. Close the dance floors. Lock them out. Shut down any means of distracting them from the impotent rage that wells within them as they fill our streets, looking for a fight.
Or we could address the cause of the problem.
A recent report from the University of Sydney on the state of Australian mental health policy tells the story of Jack, a 22-year-old man awaiting trial after assaulting an elderly man in a public park while intoxicated. He was also in a psychotic rage, but the police believed him to be merely drunk and antisocial.
Not everyone who goes out, gets drunk and becomes involved in violence has a mental illness. But those who do are contributing to creating a permissive culture of violence, and many don’t have access to the help and information they need. Twenty percent of Australians suffer from mental health problems in any given year, and our governments are barely even paying lip service to the problem.
Psychiatric testing before Jack’s court appearance showed that rather than brain pathology, the young man was suffering mental illness caused by a range of social and learning deficits that had not been addressed.
The stigma attached to mental health problems, particularly if you are a young, angry man, is prohibitive. This is slowly changing, but for Aussie males who are out on the piss on a Friday or Saturday night, feelings are often expressed through fists.
The University of Sydney report focuses on the idea of collaborative care in mental health policy. The governments currently deciding the fate of Australian nightlife would do well to pay attention. Starting a public dialogue about mental health is one way to start addressing the problem. Despite an election commitment to prioritising mental health, the coalition government has yet to implement any significant mental health initiatives, and has barely mentioned the issue since taking office.
The Health Minister released a statement on World Mental Health Day in October last year re-affirming the Abbott Government’s commitment to mental health as a key priority, and announcing a review of existing services across all levels of mental health care. While acknowledging the evidence that young Australians are not getting the mental health help they need, the statement also indicated that the review would be aimed at cutting down on services that were being duplicated across the different mental health facilities.
One hopes that rather than cutting these services, the government facilitates collaboration and coordination between service providers and the community. So far Peter Dutton has done little with the Health portfolio. And some might suggest that perhaps this is a good thing - first do no harm and all that.
This government has made “cutting waste” a priority, and while it is reassuring that money has been allocated to certain mental healthcare initiatives like dementia research and e-health, there is concern about basic mental health funding. News around Abbott Government health policy so far indicates that costs are increasingly being shifted to private individuals in order to take pressure off the public purse.
The wide-reaching implications of placing help out of reach of some of the most vulnerable and members of Australian society have been well documented. But what of making access more difficult for the most privileged, too? Young, physically healthy men won’t suffer immediate consequences of access to mental health services being further out of reach, but it is becoming clear that eventually we will all suffer. 22-year-old Jack had been suffering mental psychosis for three years before he attacked an elderly man, but it took a night of drunken violence to draw attention to his problems. If there was better education and information available, it may not have come to that.
The Managing Madness report from the University of Sydney acknowledges that the best solution for people with mental illness is most often to be found within the community, rather than in government. But government has an important role to play in facilitating services and public debate. Mental health reform should not just be about service and budgets, but about education and awareness. The government can lead the way to a national conversation about mental health without excess expenditure, and raising awareness about mental illness will help to alleviate stigma attached to both suffering from a mental illness and seeking help.
Anne Treasure works in communications, is a recent survivor of the book industry, and exists mainly on the Internet.
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