The Australian
April 06, 2006

The states must pay up to help fix the mental health crisis

FIXING Australia's woefully inadequate and neglected mental health system is not going to be easy by any measure. For decades the mentally ill have languished in a political wilderness as successive federal and state governments engaged in buck-passing and empty rhetoric. In the meantime, the failed policy of deinstitutionalisation has seen the country's prison population explode as homeless, disturbed and sometimes dangerous mentally ill people with nowhere else to turn are swept up by the criminal justice system. Nationally, the number of beds in psychiatric hospitals has declined by 60 per cent since the 1980s as seriously sick people have been ejected in line with the orthodoxy that they will do better in a community which, tragically, often has nothing to offer.

By Simon Kearney
The Australian
April 06, 2006

THE architect of the policy that released thousands of people from asylums says the Howard Government is still failing to answer the need for accommodation for the mentally ill left on the street.

The Age
April 6, 2006 - 8:22AM

The states will come under pressure to match the federal government's $1.8 billion pledge to the ailing mental health sector.

Patricia Karvelas and Adam Cresswell
The Australian
April 06, 2006

JOHN Howard has added $1.8 billion to federal mental healthcare spending, but left the states to deal with the mentally ill who roam the streets because of the shutdown of psychiatric hospitals over the past two decades.