Compassion Fatigue

The Government has launched a $6.5 million inquiry into mental health and addiction. Health professionals and patients tell Sally Blundell what needs to change.

- Martin Hunter

Kelly Pope was alone and homeless, experiencing massive anxiety and struggling to control her behaviour and interact with others. The 21-year-old Christchurch woman was terrified of sinking back into the mood fluctuations, self-harm and eventual bipolar disorder that had marked her highschool years.

Desperate, she went to her GP, who referred her to the specialist mental-health services at the hospital. The specialist mental-health services told her she was not “unwell” enough for ongoing therapeutic support and referred her back to her GP. Three times she was assessed; three times she was bounced back to her doctor.

Pope says her experience is not unusual. “People talk about the John Kirwan effect – we have these great mental-health campaigns telling people it is okay to reach out, but where is the help?

“You have mental-health [services] saying your doctor should be able to handle it, your doctor saying, ‘It is out of my hands.’ You go into crisis services, but if it can be explained as a psychosocial issue rather than a mental illness, you are screened out. You can be suicidal, but if that is because of a job loss or relationship breakdown and not because of mental illness, they say try somewhere else. Sometimes there is not a somewhere else to go to. It seems like the whole system has a bit of compassion fatigue.”

Putting an end to that sense of fatigue is the job of the Government’s new $6.5 million inquiry into mental health and addiction, chaired by law professor and former Health and Disability Commissioner Ron Paterson.

Due to report back to the Government by the end of October, the inquiry has a wide, “ground-breaking” scope, wrote Warwick Brunton, a retired senior teaching fellow in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Otago.