Roman Travers: Mental health help has to be better for our young people

Here’s something I’ve learnt over the years; never ask anyone how they are unless we truly have time to hear the truth.  Good health is often something we take for granted until we don’t have it - and good mental health precedes everything else in life.  Covid-19 and the ensuing fallout has manifested in so many ways for so many different people.   The initial inability to work followed by inability to justify retaining some jobs was closely followed by the train crash in mental health seen in adults and adolescents.  Those with expertise in treating mental health saw fewer children and teenagers last year largely due to the ongoing disruptions caused by the pandemic.  This wasn’t only due to the inability to get into a critical first scheduled appointment; it was also the inability for our healthcare professionals to recruit into mental health services.  Our mental health professionals have told the Government that the pandemic has disproportionately affected our young people and that the effects will be ongoing and extensive.   In a nutshell, our mental health services were incapable of addressing the growing need for mental healthcare and now it’s simply being crushed by the weight of the acute increase.  When you have a government that’s unable to address such a critical concern for us all; when you have a government that simply asks for more information and ongoing statistics relating to this virtual grenade whose pin has already been pulled; then the outcome can only be of greater ongoing concern for us all.  This is incredibly confronting: the number of young people alone requiring acute mental health care has tripled in the past ten years.   In that same ten years, the number of young people with acute mental health concerns that have turned up in accident and emergency departments has increased by 400 percent.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.