Prevention, not cure: ‘We can’t just approach mental health from the disease end’

Much of Australia's mental ill-health could be avoided if rather than focus on the system, we fix societal factors that lead to distress

Mental health system reform is focused on providing more services while failing to evaluate whether those services make people better, leaving people cycling in and out of a system that fails to prevent them from getting sicker, former national mental health commissioner Professor Ian Hickie says.

Hickie, a psychiatrist and co-director of health and policy at the University of Sydney's Brain and Mind Centre, says to prevent suicide and other acute mental health events, healthcare practitioners need to better understand what works, but data around how people fare following psychological, medicinal and hospital treatment is lacking.