Public Mental Healthcare: What happens to Massey students after they graduate, and why you should care
Whether you’re a student or a graduate, a worker or unemployed, young New Zealanders need access to mental health support, and the public system is struggling to keep up. While Massey University provides on-campus mental health services, once students graduate it’s up to the public or private mental health systems to help them through. One thing consistent throughout the public mental health sector however, is wait times. Please note, that if you are struggling with your mental health, Massive still urges you to reach out to health systems, friends and whānau for support.
Massive put out a call for people who have attempted to get mental health through the public system and within an hour was inundated with stories, experiences and quotes. Charlotte, a previous Massey student, said she had her GP send a “referral through last year in like June and I still haven’t heard back at all”. Bee*, a graduate, stated that they felt like they were “completely failed by the system. Wait times for the public system would be nuts, GPs ultimately didn’t care enough to be thorough and I got really messed up by the whole thing.” Yasmin, another person who’d attempted to get public care, simply said “getting mental health support for me was bullshit”.
Many of the stories were the same. Unsustainable wait times for care that was urgently needed, only to be given a counsellor instead of a psychiatrist or high-level clinician. Eve is someone who has moved to America in order to get access to specific types of treatment. She told Massive, “I went for years not being listened to (about symptoms I was having) and having psychiatrists telling me to just exercise and shaming me for not being able to get out of bed when the medication they put me on was really screwing me up.”
“Their assessment criteria is such bullshit. I’ve been turned away and ignored by the [public health system] and have had to literally travel to America to receive a different kind of therapy.” She finished with her experience that it’s “a lot easier to get anti-depressants and meds prescribed than ongoing affordable care”.
Massive also spoke to Michael, a student on placement at a Crisis Response Unit. The Crisis Unit is not a standard part of the public mental health system, more an immediate response for those facing urgent mental health crises. From there, they are able to hand people off to appropriate public or student mental health systems. He spoke on some of his observations, saying the Crisis Unit is “mainly that net at the bottom of the cliff rather than any sort of upstream stopping people jumping off the cliff initially”. He thinks that “probably the most helpful thing for a lot of the people we see would be a long-term consistent psychologist for decent therapeutic work. A lot of what psychiatrists do isn’t actually therapy it’s more assessments so checking over someone and being like these are the problems you have here are solutions that are out there.”
When asked about avenues people not facing crisis can take to seek the right support Michael made an unconventional statement. “Admin staff are really good because they’ll be like ‘do you want this service this service or this service?’ They are people that are often overlooked in the mental health service as a whole.” Michael says that people tend to “jump straight to doctors, psychologists and high-level clinicians that you see face to face long-term, but quite often it’s the support people around that clinician that can really push through and organise this chaos. They’re the ones who’ve got input from so many different people.”
In the public system, there are no jumping queues, and even basic assessments can take weeks if not months to obtain. People who find this system so difficult to access often stop trying because of the convoluted process. With private counselling nearing $200 for a 30-minute Zoom call, there are very few avenues’ people on a low income can take to ensure quick, adequate, and helpful mental healthcare. But at the end of the day, any changes made to the system have to be made so far in advance that it is often years until they take effect. Even with recently boosted funding, systems are still overflowing and people are facing months of waiting to even be seen. At what point do people decide enough is enough? And what steps can be taken to immediately increase the capacity for mental health services?