It's always full, always.
I've never heard of one person actually going in to hospital
and getting a bed straight away, never.
If that was happening in cancer, or heart disease
it would be a national scandal, and it is a scandal
that we don't have appropriate lifesaving mental health care
for people with mental illness.
People are being neglected or forgotten about
and it's not therapeutic, it's not helping them.
It's just sort of ignoring them.
I can't even look at his picture.
I can't look at him because it hurts so much
and I feel that he was failed.
I survived. Others didn't.
And it's not fair.
We shouldn't die thinking that we're not worth something.
- What do we want? - More beds.
- When do we want it? - Now.
Tasmania's mental health system is in crisis.
Nurses and other medical staff from the Royal Hobart Hospital
are rallying outside the State Parliament to protest bed shortages.
It's the difficulty of people who have serious mental health problems
who are getting holed up in our emergency department too long.
The shortage of psychiatry beds at the Royal Hobart Hospital
really happened around about five years ago.
There was a reduction from 42 inpatient beds to 32.
It was strongly resisted
by the psychiatry staff at the Royal Hobart Hospital
and we've noticed problems since that time.
The cuts left only 19 mental health hospital beds
for every 100,000 Tasmanians.
By comparison NSW has almost double that number.
We have acutely ill patients with serious mental health issues
being stuck for inordinately long periods of time
in our emergency department.
I think the record is something like six days.
It's so busy, very bright, you can hear people in pain.
You can't sleep and that's the most important thing you need at this time
is to sleep.
My name's Theresa. I'm a full-time mum of four children,
this little one being the youngest.
Last year in August I had what you would call I suppose a breakdown
and a big one at that.
I went to commit suicide.
I got taken to the Royal Hobart Hospital.
When I got there they explained to me
that the psychiatric ward was absolutely full.
I could either go home
or I could wait to see if a bed became available.
It took about four days before that bed became available.
The last night I spent in emergency I was asked to leave,
pack my belongings and go and wait in the waiting room
because the emergency was so full.
At that stage I thought, what is the point?
If I can't get help at home, I can't get help in here,
what is the point?
So, I walked all the way along that highway to that bridge
and I was getting closer and closer
and I thought to myself there's no point.
I wanted to jump.
At the Royal Hobart Hospital alone
there have been several deaths attributed to the bed shortage.
In 2016 a man who was told there were no available psychiatric beds
returned home and killed himself later that day.
The coroner found the lack of beds directly led to his death.
Later that same year, a young man who was waiting to be admitted
to the psychiatric ward...
And just earlier this year a woman took her life while being treated
in the general service unit of the psychiatric ward.
We're faced with a heavy patient load
of people who need a lot of care and support
we just don't necessarily always have the staff to cope with.
So people are being neglected or forgotten about
and it's not therapeutic, it's not helping them,
it's just sort of ignoring them.
In essence helping the condition become a bit worse
before we can really start actively treating them on the ward
because it's not a therapeutic environment at all.
Michelle is a psychiatric nurse.
She knows first-hand just how dangerous bed shortages can be.
She says private mental health clinics are part of the problem.
If a patient is seen to be an acute risk to themselves
or dangerous or agitated in a manner
that private system doesn't believe that they can cope with
they will just refer them on to the emergency department.
I can't go nowhere.
My children need me.
I want people like myself to realise they can ask for help
and they can get help.
But it takes for someone to get hurt before someone listens
and it shouldn't be like that.
Experts say there are two critical shortages.
One is the lack of psychiatric beds in public hospitals,
the other is adequate community-based mental health clinics.
But there's nothing between the GP and the specialist acute care.
So just building a whole lot of new beds, that'll just take us back
to the 19th century when we had institutions.
So we need community mental health services to turn off the tap
cos there's just a flow, there's a tide of people
coming into emergency departments looking for beds
and appearing to need admission,
whereas if they'd been looked after properly in the community earlier
then they wouldn't have presented in the first place.
Tasmania has the second-highest youth suicide rate in Australia.
Despite this, it has no dedicated psychiatric wards
for children and adolescents.
The nearest facility is in Melbourne
and advocates say local services in Tassie are so stretched
young people are falling through the cracks.
Christopher was 17 and he died on 1 April 2016.
Dian lives in Somerset,
which is about a four-hour drive north of Hobart.
He was a beautiful baby and he was very loving and a cuddly baby.
He was beautiful.
And this one I love. He's so cute.
It hurts really bad he's not with us.
When he was about 14 and 15 he started to change.
He got very withdrawn. He stayed in his room.
And I think that he might have had a bit of trouble at school
as well, a bit of bullying.
Christopher was put on medication
and referred to a community-based mental health service
for children and adolescents
where he saw a string of fly in and fly out psychiatrists.
They'd stay for a while then they'd go
so every time he saw a psychiatrist
they'd put him on medication then they'd leave.
Then they'd get another one that comes in
and "Oh no, you don't want him on that."
Then they'd take him off the tablets, like he went cold turkey,
and then he just went right down, hit rock bottom
and then he started doing things to himself.
He tried to kill himself three times.
Increasingly desperate, Dian tried to get Christopher admitted
into a nearby adult psychiatric ward.
Because I was worried, I was scared.
And they turned around and they said
"Sorry but there's no beds, we can't do it."
And then I said "Well, can you put him in hospital?
"He needs to go somewhere, can you put him in hospital?"
And they said "No, we can't do that."
And I feel like I was just really let down.
And after that he did it, he killed himself.
Coming across and seeing it, it's taken a long time
to get that image out of my head.
Um, it's just the worst thing that you can come across and see.
It's like my world went just black and like ice,
straight through my backbone, straight through my body.
All I wanted to do was to be with my son
and, and I still find it hard and I miss him so much.
And I feel that if there was more help
he would've been still here and I love him so much.
The neglect of youth mental health or adolescent mental health
is a form of self harm that the society inflicts on itself,
and that's what's happened, there's been a serious underinvestment
especially around adolescents and emerging adults.
We need strong proactive community mental health hubs
which have expert mental health professionals, drug and alcohol,
mobile teams, all of the things we know work
in preventive mental health care for serious mental illness.
I haven't seen any real evidence yet
of this issue being taken seriously
by the government that has been elected.
Tasmania's Health Minister declined The Feed's request for an interview,
but said this in a statement...
But Dr Nicklason says urgent action is needed today.
We have a problem that needs to be addressed right now
and it needs to be substantially more beds than we have at the moment
and we haven't yet got that commitment to fund that
and to develop that facility.
I'm more determined than optimistic.
He needed a place where children could go.
He needed a proper psychiatrist where they don't swap and change.
And I think that if he had that support
where they had somewhere to go for children
it would've helped a lot.
And I feel that the government has let us down as well
and I still think that they should be ashamed of themselves.