Professor Hickie's positive response to the Prime Minister's announcements of major improvements in support for mental health, as well as some of his concerns, are generally shared by Australia's psychologists, whose established ability to meet a large part of Australia's mental health needs has been frustrated by government policies, including the exclusion of psychologists from Medicare despite evidence that their inclusion would lower total health care costs. The government's policy reversal, as announced by the Prime Minister, is welcome and will benefit the psychologically troubled people who have been unable to access qualified psychological services because of the lack of governmental financial support and the inadequate services provided by the states.
However, Professor Hickie's concerns that psychologists will rort the Medicare system as a few of his medical colleagues have done, although expressed less offensively here than elsewhere, are an unwarranted slight on another profession with as firm a code of ethics as his own. If Medicare in its present form is open to rorting by unscrupulous practitioners, the answer is to reform the system, not to maintain an obstacle to ordinary Australians obtaining evidence-based psychological treatment.
Equally obviously, if state governments fear a flight of public sector psychologists to private practice after the foreshadowed changes to Medicare, the answer is to make a public sector career in psychology more attractive, with salaries that recognise the lengthy training and specialist skills of clinical psychologists, meaningful career paths, and recognition of psychologists' advanced specialist skills that cannot be equated with brief training for nurses or GPs.
Like Professor Hickie, we look forward to financial and structural arrangements that facilitate and support our working in collaboration with our colleagues in the other health professions, including psychiatrists. Many of us have been doing this for some years.
Dr Bob Montgomery
Director of Communications
Australian Psychological Society

Chronic drug and alcohol abuse leading to mental illnesses appears to be rife in black and white communities.
These illnesses are mostly self induced and ways to prevent them need to be put in place.
Our young people , black and white, need to be taught new ways of thinking while those who are responsible for supplying the drugs and alcohol should be made pay for at least some of the costs.
No person with mental illness should be out of care no matter what the difficulty.

Does Prof Hickie believe what PM Howard is offering?. I do not, the next thing i expect is that he will be selling snake oil on his daily telly ads.

Even if Howard pumped 10 billion into it, by the time Labor state Governments took (Looted) it, there would be just enough left to buy a sandwich and a milk shake, maybe a lolly pop, but that would be pushing it a bit.
The humor is astounding: Labor governments pitching in some money indeed. Fanciful thinking, just ask State treasury where has all the money gone?
These books when they are open to public scrutiny will be interesting.

Let's work out the money and services that our "Governments" have taken away from this vital health service, after it has been starved of funds and lucrative property sites sold off for profit.

Then calculate the money the Government say they are putting back into it?

Those of us working in mental health have been powerless and abused by the lack of facilities and psychopathic administrators. Many of us have left the public sector reluctantly. What has been lacking is a leader who has some policital punch and Ian Hichie has provided this. All power to him. To get the PM bringing it to the nations polical heart has been a great achievment. Many inquiries have been completley ignored. 3.6 billion dolars(if the states match the PM.s offer) is a good start to the menty years of mismanagement, deaths and lack of treatment of the mentally ill. The depths of dispair, feeling, hopelessness and utter frustration by relatives in this wealthy counrty can't be emphasised enough. The administrators who carried out this pogrom are criminally neglegent.

So someone like Ian Hichie is worth their weight in gold.
Associate Professor Brian Boettcher