Good morning, my name is Ruth Vine I'm the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Mental Health and my
shout out today is for all those people who are cueing to get their vaccination done in some of
the new mass hubs. And also for people who've got friends and family overseas that they really want
to see and they want to see soon. So today I'm going to answer three questions. First question,
when will someone need to go to hospital for a mental illness?
Yeah, thanks for that question. So firstly, let me just say that there are, um inpatient beds,
hospital beds, for people with with mental illness or psychiatric illness, in both the public
and the private sector and most often a person will need to be in hospital for a mental illness
for a whole range of different diagnoses, but for particular reasons, and the reasons might be
that the illness is very severe and they really can't look after themselves at home, they really
can't be safe at home, they might be be unable to self-care, they might be having thoughts that
they don't want to be around that they don't want to live in this world. So there might be safety
reasons why a person needs to be in hospital but also a person might need to be in hospital
when the when the illness is severe and the treatment is quite complex
and they need to be thoroughly sort of supported and assessed and seen by doctors
as well as nurses, maybe as well as other health professionals, including psychologists and others.
So they might need some investigations and have their treatment stabilized. But the vast
majority of care for people with psychiatric illness, still happens in the community,
sometimes people will come to those hospital beds through an emergency department, sometimes it
will be a direct arranged admission, and that particularly happens in the private sector.
I should also just mention, that some people who go to hospital for mental illness, come in under
mental health legislation, that is they come in in as a compulsory patient that's for the shortest
time possible and it's to keep people safe and get treatment started. Thank you very much.
Second question, what are the signs to look out for if you think a friend or family member may
have an eating disorder and what steps should be taken to support them? Yeah thanks for that.
Often people who develop an eating disorder it can, it can develop quite gradually and it
can be quite hard to notice, someone just starts paying a bit of extra attention to their diet, or
they seem to start exercising and then you start worrying that, hang on this this diet's getting
too narrow, eating behaviours are getting really odd, maybe the person seems to exercise, exercise,
exercise all the time and associated with that is losing more weight than even they might have
intended at the beginning, and certainly that you, as their family or friend, think is reasonable.
And sometimes there are other behaviours, eating disorders can also be associated with eating too
much, often eating secretly and even self-induced vomiting, so there are different patterns but
really the common thing is that the person goes too far and sort of has lost control of it,
and when you're worried about this a few things I'd suggest, firstly get informed, there's lots
of good information on websites. You can go to The Butterfly Foundation, or National Eating Disorders
Collaboration, or the Centre of Excellence in Eating Disorder, they've all got good websites
with good information so you get primed. And then it's absolutely appropriate to express your
concern and ask if there's anything you can do to help. It's always better to get help early than to
wait for a long time, when those behaviours are really ingrained and the person really has sort
of lost control of where they want to go. So find out, get help and help that person to get help.
And finally, we often hear that people with mental illness face stigma or discrimination
is this true? Look, sadly I think that is true. And just to perhaps explain just a little bit,
stigma stigma is sort of when we we view, some particular aspect of a person in a negative way,
or in a derogative, derogatory way, and then when, when a stigma is attached to a person,
how we behave, or how our systems behave is unfair and discriminatory. And so perhaps to
give some examples, it's not so much now, but there was a time when, if a person presented to
an emergency department with a mental illness, some people thought you don't need to come to
an emergency department, you are taking up the space of someone who's got a real illness,
someone who's got a physical illness, but I think people are much better now at understanding that
mental illness can be just as severe, just as dangerous, but, still and in discrimination,
we sometimes see that again in some forms of insurance, like health insurance,
or superannuation, or life insurance, people ask have you had a mental illness? or have you
sought treatment for a mental illness? and that might then have a negative, negative
consequence for that person's insurance. So, it's uh, it's probably worse for people with more
severe illnesses still and I think this relates to a lack of understanding, and we don't talk
about it openly enough. I think we are much better than we used to be about some of those illnesses,
like depression and anxiety, I think there is much less discrimination about that, but
it's still something we need to be really alert to and if you sort of spot it in your workplace, or
in how people interact with others in their school groups, or in their community groups,
it's you know, call it out, and say "hang about,
any of us can develop a mental illness that's there's no negativity there" and we absolutely
shouldn't be behaving differently or giving people lesser services or lesser recognition because of
a mental illness. So I think it's better, I think it's still there, we need to keep working at it.
Thank you.