Australia's mental health report card shows an urgent need for improvement in an overworked and underfunded system. Psychiatrist Dr Mark Cross, author of 'Mental State', is very familiar with both as a practitioner - and a patient himself.
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00:00I do public work again, so you go in and out, and I'm now back doing telehealth, actually.
00:09But when you've got daily grind of people coming into the emergency department, so that's
00:13always the sharp section of where people need to access help, and they sit there for days
00:21sometimes waiting for access to a bed, or they get turned away.
00:25So one example, I was on ABC Q&A two years ago, and a member of the audience stood up,
00:30I'll never forget her, she looked at me and said, we took my brother in, he was suicidal,
00:37he was sent home, and he died.
00:40What can you do?
00:41And I said, we have to do better.
00:43We have to do better.
00:44That's all I could say.
00:45And if you're watching this, you were a great inspiration for me writing this book.
00:52Amazing.
00:53How much of that weight have you carried with you?
00:59You know, I always bat questions away from me, because I still think, oh, you shouldn't
01:02talk about me, I shouldn't accept all these things, I shouldn't talk about not being able
01:08to do my job.
01:09Because how we were trained, and that's how I look at it in the book, how we were trained
01:12was to be stiff upper lip, don't share of yourself, you know, people look up to you,
01:17you have to just be there for everyone.
01:19And that's the problem.
01:20It's part of the problem, isn't it?
01:21It's part of the problem.
01:22And frontline workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, anyone working in the system, they carry this
01:29with them, they carry this with them, because they can't be open, because they're scared
01:33of losing their job, or being seen as not able to fulfill their job.
01:38That's part of the huge problem.
01:40And so they carry on, carry on, carry on, until, like me, you finally realize you've
01:45got PTSD, or you've got some sort of anxiety, you can't cope, you're crying, you don't want
01:50going to work, but you can't talk because you can't be open.
01:55And then there's a horrible rabbit well, and then everyone's leaving.
02:00Yeah.
02:01I remember talking to a doctor during COVID.
02:05And he said, we're dealing with COVID right now, but the next pandemic will be a mental
02:10health pandemic.
02:13Is that what we're seeing now?
02:14Do you think?
02:15Well, if you look at Victoria, especially, you know, after all their lockdowns, young
02:20people especially have really developed mental health issues from that.
02:24And we're still seeing, you know, it's like waves, isn't it from from then, even though
02:28it feels like 10 years ago now, doesn't it?
02:31But you're still seeing waves from then with young people having really been scarred by
02:35the experience.
02:37And I don't know if you're, you know, I always make things a bit personal for people.
02:42So just yesterday, my tennis coach, a neighbor at the shopping center, two friends and an
02:47ex-secretary of mine all contacted me for help with one of their loved ones because
02:51they're desperate, because they can't get help for them.
02:55That's the nature of the beast, right?
02:57Yeah.