A Pulse-Check: Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System

This page will be updated in the future with analysis. Here is the raw data on respondents to a four-day survey on the implementation of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.

How I went about it

Between Thursday 6th and Monday 10th of March I made a survey available on Microsoft Forms with 11 questions about the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. I shared this online through social media channels and encouraged others to do so. Below are visual representations of those results.

Limitations

There are obvious sampling limitations, which should primarily be used to undertake a more rigorous, independent and well-researched survey of the Victorian mental health sector, people with lived experience and the broader community on their views. Irrespective of whether these are fully representative of the community, they speak to strong views within some sectors of the community - those who use the mental health system and work in it - that should warrant concern and action.

So, who filled out the survey?

Below we see a sample of 51 participants, mostly consumers and consumer workers. However there are more than a dozen family members and several government and allied health workers.

What did people think of the Royal Commission itself?

Knowing where people sit in response to the Royal Commission can help make sense of what they think the aftermath and implementation has been like. Two reasonable conclusions below are that:

People did not believe there was sufficient representation (perhaps speaking to no Consumer Commissioner and no First Nations Commissioner)

People did believe the Royal Commission made good findings and recommendations.

What do people think of the Victorian Government and its implementation of the reforms?

The feedback appears critical. For example:

90.1% of people disagreed that the Victorian Government is on-track to implement all of the Royal Commission recommendations

88.2% of people disagreed that the government was being transparent about implementation

Respondents were less certain about areas such as whether workforce were adequately supported, with the disagreement being just 58.8%. But in all cases, disagreement with these positive indicators was above 50%. In just one question did more than 10% of people agree with a positive statement.

What did people think of the system itself?

Off this low base, there was comparatively more positive sentiment regarding the rebalancing towards community-based and lived experience-led services (31.5% agree/58.5% disagree), such as by the first tranche of the Locals being rolled out (the next tranch is on hold and other lived experience-led services and the Lived Experience Agency are as-yet unfunded). Given the lower number of families, carers and supporters, its hard to know exactly how to read whether the higher percentage (17.6%, still very low) of people who believed the system supports families, carers, supporters and kin.

Deeper concerns raised are:

Only 2% of people agree that the mental health system is compliant with human rights and only 3.9% agree that the system is culturally safe and responsive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and only 7.8% agreed that the system was responsive to people’s individual needs

73.6% of people disagree with the statement that the mental health system follows the law (i.e. the Mental Health and Wellbeing Act 2022).

Are the key institutions doing their job?

We far too often focus just on the above issues, but not on the institutions that can address those issues. They are the ones with resources, statutory and cultural power to do so. Without focusing our attention on institution, we will be fractured into an issue-by-issue debate that favours the status quo. So what did people think of whether institutions were performing their role?

Working back from the less disastrous to the most disastrous:

People were most divided about the Mental Health Tribunal, with many not knowing whether they are performing their functions (40.8%) while 18.3% agreeing that they are performing their function - still, 40.8% disagreed with the statement that they were doing their job

Nobody really appears to know whether the Secretary is doing their job (53.1%), perhaps speaking to the need for more visible leadership

The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission had by far the most negative sentiment, with 73.5% of respondents disagreeing (most of them strongly disagreeing) with the statement that they were performing their role.

Are these institutions contributing to transformation?

These institutions are not just required to fulfill their statutory functions, they are central to transforming the mental health system. Views on this front were also not positive:

40.8% of people didn’t have a view on whether the Chief Psychiatrist was/wasn’t contributing on this front

65.4% of people disagreed with the statement that the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission - one of the two primary centrepieces of the transformation - were contributing to transformation. This was the most consistently negative.

38.8% of people strongly disagreed (55.1% disagreed/strongly disagreed) with the statement that the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing was contributing to transformation. The Collaborative Centre had the most polarised responses (though negative overall), with 38.8% strongly disagreeing while 14.3% agreeing (not strongly agreeing).

Are institutions complying with our human rights laws?

All of these bodies have duties to properly consider and comply with human rights. My writing and experience says that all regularly breach the law in this respect. This is often hard to demonstrate and hard to identify, as it is often pointing to an absence of doing something (e.g. a human rights impact assessment).

People were more circumspect on this point, with the largest numbers of neither agree/disagree.

51.1% neither agreed nor disagreed on whether the Secretary was complying with the Charter

45.8% neither agreed nor disagreed on whether the Collaborative Centre was complying with the Charter (39.6% disagree, 14.6% agree)

52.5% of people disagreed with a statement that the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission was complying with the Charter (41.7% neither agree/disagree, 6.3% agree)

Are these institutions partnering with lived experience?

Partnership with people with lived experience is central to the reforms. How did they go?

65.3% of people disagreed that the Chief Psychiatrist was authentically partnering with people with lived experience

16.3% of people agreed that the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission was authentically partnering - a high watermark on their results (46.9% disagree)

24.4% of people agreed (highest among institutions) that the Collaborative Centre was authentically partnering with people with lived experience (51% disagreed)

Do you know enough and does it matter?

We are 18 months away from the next state election. It is often the case that mental health is not an election issue (with the exception of the 2018 state election). Without the sector stepping up and asking questions from different political parties, this trend is likely to continue or worsen (mental health being deprioritised). Respondents spoke about whether they knew enough about the different parties, and whether the roll-out on the reforms would impact their vote at that election.

Over half (55%) said they needed to know more from political parties (and these are people working inside the system)

Over half (55% again) said that the rollout of these reforms would impact how they voted at the next state election.