Chris Shipway: The mental health budget is currently 8.1 per cent of the New South Wales health budget. That’s slightly down on what it was about 18 months ago. I think it was 8.4 per cent of the budget.

There’s a lot of debate nationally and internationally about whether 8.1 per cent is the appropriate share of the state’s health budget. The highest claims for the mental health slice are around 10.3 per cent. You want to be somewhere between 8 and 10 per cent if you’re approaching international benchmarks.

The mental health budget has been growing in real terms in New South Wales over the last five or six years. The really significant increase in the budget came around the 2005-06 financial year under Morris Iemma’s premiership, when at that point the budget grew nearly 10 per cent in real terms. The initiative that New South Wales Health is particularly proud of is the housing accommodation support initiative which is a partnership between the community-based NGO sector, New South Wales Housing, and Mental Health Services.

From a health economic rationalist point of view, this minimises the number of acute admissions. There’s a youth health model which in the spectrum of care is probably in the more acute-care end compared to HeadSpace (early intervention program), but we’ve got several examples where these multi-faceted youth mental health teams, often with early psychosis positions attached to them, are working with HeadSpace.

Dawn O’Neil: The official Australian Bureau of Statistics for suicide for 2007 was 1,881, but that’s just been revised up to 2,054. The number of deaths by intentional self-harm for both men and women aged 15 to 44 is 1,128, which is double the road-related deaths for that age group. And, a significant number of those deaths on the roads are actually suicides.

John Mendoza: The overall burden of mental health disability is the highest of any disorder and accounts for nearly a third of all disability in Australia: years of life, loss, productivity, and so forth. The system is completely around the wrong way.

It’s as if health reform has gone through every other area of health and yet with metal health we’ve stayed stuck in the 1960s. There’s a universal call for us to revamp and reform radically our mental health services, to reorient them to that primary prevention, early prevention focus that we have across all other areas of health. No government in Australia has got that right.