WESTERN suburbs residents will be among the hardest hit by this week’s closure of the state’s only 24-hour mental health advice line.
More than a quarter of the 800 monthly calls to the Mental Health Advice Line came from Melbourne’s north-west. It shut down at midnight on Monday.
Mental Health Minister Mary Wooldridge’s spokesman, Michael Moore, said the advice line had not met expectations.
He said it averaged only 800 calls a month, compared to other services such as Lifeline which received nearly 10,000 monthly calls.
“Discontinuing the service will also help reduce the confusion in the community around the number of telephone lines people can call,” he said.
“From March 19, anyone calling the mental health advice line will be transferred to Nurse-on-Call, which operates 24 hours a day.”
Williamstown MP Wade Noonan said the government seemed to be measuring the effectiveness of the service by the number of calls received.
“But if the service helps a person through their darkest hour of despair and gets them the treatment they need, then surely that’s what counts the most,” he said.
“Closing the statewide mental health advice line will simply compound existing stresses on frontline mental health services.”
Health and Community Services Union state secretary Lloyd Williams said the closure of the advice line would put even more pressure on workers.
“The calls will be picked up by our mental health teams and it will just put more pressure on the system.”
The director of New View Psychology, Maria Mercuri, said many western suburbs residents relied on services like the advice line because it could take months to get access to a psychologist.
“Finance is a big factor and to get onto a bulk-billing psychologist is very difficult, so people ended up waiting a long time to get treatment.”
Youth worker Les Twentyman said the government was putting dollars before people’s lives.
