Refugees and asylum seekers marooned on Manus Island are at grave risk of an impending mental health crisis, a coalition of humanitarian agencies is warning Australia's political leaders.
Advocates who have just returned from a week in Papua New Guinea have delivered a bleak assessment about the "most insidious and deep impact" indefinite detention is having on about 600 men.
"We are robbing them of their freedom, denying them all hope and condemning them to terrible suffering," World Vision chief advocate Tim Costello told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.
Mr Costello described meeting men on Manus Island with fear and anxiety written across their faces and whose bodies were frozen in fear.
"I know they're coping with torture and terror from where they have fled, and retraumatised from being held here, and terrible fear about random violence that can break out," he said.
The last of about 300 men refusing to leave the now-closed detention facility were forcibly removed on Friday, ending a tense three-week stand-off.
They joined hundreds of others already moved to alternative accommodation sites.
Mr Costello said the Australian government had absolved itself of its responsibility, with one of the new facilities still three to four weeks away from being completed.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton maintains the alternative sites are equipped to handle men from the decommissioned detention centre.
Mr Dutton said the ongoing construction works were to cater for an additional intake of about 154 detainees from Port Moresby and potentially Australia.
"I mean we have done the construction work, we have provided the facilities that are there, and there's a lot of misinformation that's around," he told Network Ten on Monday.
"There are lots of good people that have a lot of emotion in this space."
Mr Dutton pinned the problem on those who wanted refugees and non-refugees brought to Australia, insisting that would never happen.
But for the agencies, more pressing than the unprepared housing is the mental health and wellbeing of the men being held there.
Marc Purcell, from the Australian Council for International Development, said medical services on Manus Island were clearly inadequate.
Complex mental health issues were being referred to "the provincial hospital of a developing country" and there were no pharmacies able to dispense psychiatric drugs.
"People are floundering," he told reporters.
"Every day that goes by, these people are being damaged."
Mr Costello said it was shameful Medecins Sans Frontieres officers were denied access to asylum seekers.
"The first thing we're calling for is immediate access and assessment by doctors to these refugees and those who have been rejected to assess their mental health," Mr Costello said.
"Anyone assessed with significant mental health issues - and we believe there's many in this category - need to be medivacced to Australia to be given the proper mental health protections."
