Achi news desk-
Australian defense personnel do not have access to enough mental health professionals, the man who leads the Defense department has warned, and throwing more money at the problem is not a viable solution.
Department of Defense secretary Greg Moriarty AO told the Royal Commission on Veteran Defense and Suicide on Tuesday that the country’s widespread and severe labor shortage in professional mental health services has affected health care provision in the military and public service, despite a focus “intense” on helping soldiers. , sailors, airmen and public service workers who struggle with psychological trauma.
“We don’t have enough mental health professionals for the Australian community at large,” he said.
“Certainly within the defense establishment, they are hard to recruit.”
The shocking coverage reveals the deep complexity of the suicide crisis engulfing the country’s defense community, which has claimed the lives of 1600 servicemen and women between 1997 and 2020 – 20 times the number of soldiers killed on active duty.
“Some of these challenges cannot be addressed by injecting more money,” said Mr Moriarty.
“The people (mental health professionals) simply don’t exist and I think that’s a national challenge.”
The department set up a specialist mental health and wellbeing branch in 2023 to partly tackle the dire challenge, but Mr Moriarty said it would take time and extensive research for the new body to understand the range and complexity of the problem in full and developing changing policies. results at ground level.
“Without quality data, it’s very difficult to make those small adjustments that might just improve the quality of an intervention,” he said.
Mr Moriarty took over the department in 2017 and his tenure was renewed for another five-year term in 2022.
He is responsible for implementing the government’s grand defense vision in conjunction with Chief of Defense Forces General Angus Campbell.
As part of that general briefing, Mr Moriarty said he was responsible for maintaining a “healthy” Defense workforce.
“We cannot achieve the missions and effects that the government needs from us if we do not have a healthy and capable workforce,” he said.
Erin Longbottom KC, counsel assisting the commission, pressed Mr Moriarty on whether he and the department had been slow to confront the mental health crisis as it passed through the country’s defense community, but Mr Moriarty refused the offer that.
“The issue of suicide has been a concern for Defense over a number of years,” he said.
“It goes back several years but I think we’ve conceptualized it in terms of a wider well-being function in recent years.”
He said the department had made some “very significant improvements” in the way it handles mental health and that leadership had not been “passive” in response to the challenge.
He said he was hopeful about the improvements the new mental health branch would bring to armed forces personnel.
“It’s on a growth path,” he said.
He acknowledged that his understanding of suicide in the defense and veterans community had “broadened” during his tenure, moving away from what he called a “simplistic and narrow” emphasis on deployments and their impact on mental health to the multiple complex factors that create the challenge. .
The commission has held multiple hearings across the country and received approximately 230,000 documents, 5889 submissions and heard from 344 witnesses, investigating the complex mental health challenge.
Earlier on Tuesday, the commission heard from Dr Karen Bird, who lost her Afghanistan veteran son Jesse to suicide in 2017.
The heartbroken mother hit out at what she called a “delay, deny, die” culture within the Australian Defense Force.
