If mental health is the often forgotten gap in the black hole of growing health demands there may be an even bigger economic elephant in the room; the care we don’t pay for.
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Since the de-institutionalisation of many mental health homes and hospitals in the last decades of the twentieth century, the community has absorbed many of these patients.
But it is the community; families, welfare agencies and other volunteers who have also absorbed many of the demanding care roles and it is the community who in many cases have continued to pay the price.
A new report indicated there is an ongoing cost of a much larger kind. Australian carers are providing free services to their loved ones that would otherwise cost the government $13.2 billion.
The Mind Australia report showed this far exceeded the $8.5 billion spent on mental health during the 2014-15 financial year. The figures are staggering, informal mental health carers provided the equivalent to the direct support work time of nearly 180,000 full-time mental health workers per year.
If the media has continually focused on the continuing gap between the demand and the public mental health resources available, it is worth considering how much worse this problem would be. In 2015, there were about 240,000 informal mental health carers in Australia.
More worrying the report found 15 percent of these carers are young people under 25, some as young as eight years old. What is highlighted by the report is that this is not solely a financial figure but a significant flow-on impact given the significant mental health impact on these carers themselves including time out of the workforce and poorer physical and mental health.
For young people, these impacts including affecting education or employment in a critical development period, means society is building an even greater burden for the future as the problem cycles on.
While financial assistance, respite care and counselling are available the report also found only 24 percent of primary mental health carers receive carer payments and more than a third did not know what services were available.
If the report is correct and the gap between supply and demand for carers will increase over the next few decades this is not only a problem of grave urgency but one emanating from the heart of our community.
