“My daughter was seeing a psychiatrist [at Toowong] for nearly three years,” Sasha said.
“Before they closed, she received an email from the rooms of the psychiatrist saying that she was going to move to a new practice.
“But a week before she was due to start, her script ran out.”
Sasha said they contacted the new clinic and Toowong for an urgent script, but couldn’t reach the psychiatrist. When her daughter became distressed, she phoned the local hospital.
“They were really helpful, but they basically said, unless she’s suicidal, we’re not going to give her the medication, we can’t,” Sasha said.
“It just blows my mind … if you’re having a mental health crisis, they won’t help you at the hospital.”
Mounting pressure on frontline services
Between 2023 and 2024, there were more than 71,000 mental health related presentations to emergency departments across Queensland.
A report by the Australian Medical Association published last year suggested the rise demonstrated “a lack of community services”, with those suffering mental illness “forced to present at the ED as a last resort”.
Police and paramedics raised similar concerns.
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During budget estimates, the Queensland Ambulance Service told parliament they had responded to 81,000 mental health or acute behavioural disturbances last year.
Sandra Garner, the director of QAS’ mental health response program, said when the ambulance service saw people in crisis, the was often a complex interplay of physical, social and psychological factors.
“Almost 30 per cent of all calls for service to the QAS are for people aged 15 to 29 years old, with the most common presentation among this group identified as a mental health emergency,” she said.
Queensland Police had counted 63,000 initial mental health callouts last financial year – a rise that Queensland Police Union president Shane Prior warned would result in more police shootings.
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“We have a mental health system that is severely unequipped … People are simply not getting the care that they need to prevent them from reaching crisis point,” Prior told 4BC this week.
Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Queensland chair Professor Brett Emmerson said there was a lack of political willpower to allocate adequate resources to mental health.
“We’re getting probably $600 million a year more than we were [out of the latest budget], but we probably need another $500–600 million a year on top of that to provide the services we actually need,” he said.
The latest Psychiatry Supply and Demand Study found Queensland has a critical unmet workforce demand gap of more than 130 full-time psychiatrists, a number that would grow beyond 220 by 2048.
Alongside investment to grow and retain the psychiatry workforce, Emmerson said the government needed to invest in at least 300 more acute mental health beds and “several thousand more community mental health staff”.
“Without those resources, we will continue to have [people in crisis] presenting to emergency departments, police call out to emergencies, and in some tragic situations, police shootings.”
Bridging the gap
Frkovic said work is under way to plug critical gaps on a state and federal level with Medicare mental health centres, more crisis stabilisation units in hospitals, and community “safe spaces”.
But he warned they take time to build and scale, and said early intervention should remain a focus.
“[We need to] shift the system to think about upstream and how we can intervene early before people are in crisis,” he said.
“We need more focus for psychosocial support for the non-government sector … people in the community that can help deal with some of those situations rather than things escalating and people becoming acutely unwell and then police needing to be called out.”
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