Link – ‘Mental health system only works for the wealthy or dying’ – advocate
The quote from this article is about the situation in New Zealand, but it’s the same everywhere.
After 14 suicide attempts and a long battle with mental illness, 23-year-old film director Jazz Thornton co-founded advocacy group Voices of Hope to help others going through similar struggles.
“The current system isn’t working because unless you are very wealthy or on your deathbed there is nothing available to you. If you say ‘I am feeling suicidal,’ they will say, ‘Come back when you’ve tried to kill yourself,” she told Newshub Nation on Saturday.
There aren’t enough resources to go around, so choices are made. Those with enough money to buy their care, do. The rest of us have to be divided up based on the emergency level, so the only way to get to the top of that list is to actually get worse.
That seems like a really dangerous way to dole out mental health care, and the statistics are a symptom of exactly that. Mental health care works best when we can get to people early, not by waiting until they get “really bad”, but to do that, resources need to be available. Currently, they are not.
