Trying to get mental health care while in prison is, according to Ashleigh Chapman, like “navigating a minefield”.
Chapman, who was released from a Victorian prison earlier this year, said it can take months or even years to get an appointment with a mental health specialist to discuss your needs while in prison, and even longer for a first actual appointment.
“There is not enough staff to help others, and the organisations who help are not getting help either,” Chapman told About Time.
“There is no money to help those who are struggling and then it becomes a death in custody or a life-altering disability due to the way you are treated, due to not being able to see a counsellor.”
It’s estimated that about a third of all people in prison in Australia have a mental health diagnosis. Despite the huge need for support and care, a lack of staffing across the country has meant that many people in prison have been unable to get help.
The experience of trauma and mental health conditions are far more common in the prison population than the wider Australian community.
A key issue is the lack of staff, including psychologists and psychiatrists, to provide the level of mental health care required in Australia’s prisons.
According to Trevor Ma, who works as a forensic psychiatrist in NSW, prisons have become “our largest and our most underfunded providers of mental healthcare for the severely mentally ill”.
When he started working in prisons, Ma said he was “quickly confronted” with the “sheer volume of mental ill health”.
“My battle against the never-ending waitlists, teething with trauma, psychosis and general suffering had begun,” Ma wrote in a recent journal article.
“My naive aspirations to do good were becoming increasingly distant as the uneasy realisation of being complicit in the widening disparities for mentally ill prisoners set in.
“For a prison psychiatrist, it is hard to deliver quality care that is anywhere close to being equivalent to outside of the prison walls. Inside I witnessed the traumatised become re-traumatised, and the ill get punished.”
According to a United Kingdom benchmark, there should be 11 mental health nurses per 550 people in prison to ensure those in prison receive the same level of care as they would in the community.
Research by the Queensland Centre for Mental Health found that the ACT is the only Australian jurisdiction to meet this standard.
The ACT has 10 mental health nurses employed at its only prison, the Alexander Manonochie Centre, which incarcerates about 420 people. There are also two psychologists at the prison and five “counsellor-type positions”.
But all other states and territories fail to meet this benchmark, with many falling far below it.
This means that people in prison face significantly long wait times to access any support or to be moved to a mental health facility.
