Australians are experiencing extraordinary levels of psychological distress while mental health services remain underfunded and overstretched. The political cost will be measured not just in health outcomes, but in deepening distrust of government.
We are a species that struggles to sit with itself.
Watch what people actually do, rather than what they tell pollsters. Caffeine to start the day. Alcohol to end it. Nicotine to get through it. Cannabis, benzodiazepines, antidepressants, stimulants, opioids, sleeping pills. Endless scrolling. Compulsive exercise. Gambling. Food. Almost every adult in this country is running some form of daily chemistry experiment on their own mind. We are permanently uncomfortable with our state of being, and we spend extraordinary amounts of time and money trying to alter it.
The numbers tell the story. The average Australian household spends around $1,770 a year on alcohol. Households spent another $919 on average on tobacco, even as smoking rates fall. The national wastewater program estimates Australians spend more than $11 billion a year on drugs. Nearly one in three of us drinks at levels that put our health at risk. One in seven Australians, close to four million people, takes antidepressants, one of the highest rates in the world. Almost one in five of us, 5.2 million people, filled a prescription for a mental-health-related medication last year. Add it together and the social cost of tobacco alone is estimated at around $160 billion, and alcohol another $75 billion.
This is not a story about vice but a story about distress. A society that medicates itself on this scale, legally and illegally, prescribed and self-administered, is telling us something about how its people are travelling. And the formal data confirms it. More than two in five Australians will experience a diagnosable mental disorder in their lifetime. One in five experienced one in the past 12 months. Among young people aged 16 to 24, it is closer to two in five, and among young women it is almost one in two. Mental illness is now the most common reason Australians visit a GP. Suicide is the leading cause of death among young Australians.
If any physical illness afflicted the population at this scale, it would dominate every budget, every campaign and every question time. Instead, mental health sits in the second tier of the health portfolio, wheeled out for awareness weeks and quietly defunded in between.
The salience the political class refuses to see
The standard objection is that mental health does not show up as a top-order voting issue. This misreads how issue salience works. Voters do not walk into focus groups and announce that mental health determines their vote. What they describe instead is exhaustion. They describe kids on 18-month waiting lists. They describe a parent, a sibling, a workmate in crisis and nowhere to send them. They describe the emergency department as the only door that is ever open, and a door you wait 14 hours behind.
Mental health is fused with the issues that do top the polls. When young Australians name cost of living as the most important issue in the country, as 64 per cent did in Mission Australia’s most recent youth survey, an all-time high, they say in the same breath that financial strain is damaging their mental health.
Two in five young people report stress about their own mental health and wellbeing. Headspace research last year found 49 per cent of young Australians experiencing high or very high psychological distress, rising to 65 per cent among 18- to 25-year-olds. This is the same generation that is abandoning the political duopoly in record numbers. These facts are not unrelated but strongly connected.
For an electorate under this much psychological pressure, the state’s indifference to mental health is not a discrete policy failure. It becomes evidence for a broader proposition that voters in the outer suburbs and regions have been arriving at for a decade: that the system is not built for them, that governments perform concern rather than deliver care, and that the institutions asking for their trust have not earned it. Mental health is one of the purest tests of whether government works. On current performance, it does not; in fact, it has failed.
Victoria: a royal commission, a levy, and a slow retreat
Victoria is the sharpest case study, precisely because it did the right thing first.
The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System was justified and overdue. Its interim report found a system that had catastrophically failed, with an estimated 105,000 Victorians with severe mental illness receiving no specialist care.
The final report in 2021 made 65 recommendations, and the government committed to implementing every one of them. It went further. It legislated a dedicated mental health and wellbeing levy on large payrolls, forecast to raise more than $800 million a year, with every dollar hypothecated to mental health. The commission itself insisted on this, because it did not believe normal budget processes would ever prioritise mental health. That judgement has proven prophetic in ways the commissioners would not enjoy.
Because the retreat began almost immediately, and it has been conducted the way these retreats always are. Not with an announcement. With delays, deferrals and unfunded line items.
The 2024–25 budget delayed the rollout of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Locals, the cornerstone of the commission’s vision of care delivered in the community rather than in crisis. The Lived Experience Leadership Agency, a specific recommendation of the commission, was left without funding. The 500 supported housing places for young people experiencing homelessness and mental illness, another key recommendation, are now years overdue and remain unfunded.
By the 2025–26 budget, Mental Health Victoria was warning publicly that the state had failed to deliver the investment needed to keep the reform on track, four years after the commission reported. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists welcomed the workforce funding that survived, then noted that rehabilitation, housing, trauma-informed care and accessible community services, the entire architecture of the reform, remain underfunded or absent. Programs training the next generation of psychiatrists were allowed to drift to the edge of lapsing before being rescued.
Consider what this means. Victorian employers are paying a dedicated levy, raising the better part of a billion dollars every year, legislated for one purpose. And the reform that levy exists to fund is being slowed, thinned and deferred while the money keeps flowing in. Victorians were promised a rebuilt system. They are getting a partially renovated one, with the scaffolding quietly coming down before the work is finished.
It is not just Victoria
New South Wales offers the most dramatic evidence of what political neglect does to a mental health system. In January 2025, more than 200 of the state’s roughly 295 staff specialist psychiatrists in public hospitals tendered their resignations. Not over a routine pay claim, but because the system had over 30 per cent of specialist positions vacant before a single resignation was lodged, because NSW pays its psychiatrists so far below other states that it can no longer recruit, and because years of warnings that the public mental health system was at the point of collapse had been ignored.
The government’s response was to fight the specialists in the Industrial Relations Commission while wards closed and patients were pushed into general practice and the private system.
When a state loses the majority of its public psychiatrists in a single month and treats it as an industrial relations problem rather than a health emergency, the ordering of political priorities could not be clearer.
The Commonwealth has played the same game. In the middle of the pandemic, subsidised psychology sessions under Better Access were doubled from 10 to 20 a year. At the end of 2022, with distress levels still elevated and the cost of a private session sitting well above $250, the new government halved them back to 10. The stated justification was equity of access. The practical effect was that the deepest treatment offered to most Australians through Medicare is 10 sessions a year, when the evidence consistently shows complex conditions need far more. No government would fund half a course of chemotherapy and call it an equity measure.
Every state can supply its own version of the story. Understaffed acute wards. Community services running on short-term grants. Workforces bleeding into the private sector. Emergency departments as the default mental health provider.
The biggest game of ignorance
Here is the contradiction the political class refuses to confront. The public self-medicates at industrial scale. The prescription data, the alcohol data, the drug data and the survey data all point in one direction. Psychological distress is one of the defining conditions of contemporary Australian life, and it is most acute among the young and the financially stressed, the exact cohorts realigning our politics.
And yet mental health remains the portfolio that gets the press conference but not the recurrent funding. A royal commission but not the follow-through. The levy but not the delivery. Governments have discovered that the awareness era lets them substitute language for investment. Every politician has learned to say “it’s okay to not be okay”. Very few have been willing to fund what happens next.
The commissioners in Victoria understood the problem precisely. They wrote that they did not believe standard budget processes would ever prioritise mental health, which is why they demanded a protected funding stream. Governments have since demonstrated that even a protected funding stream can be outmanoeuvred by delay.
There is a political cost coming for this, and it will not arrive labelled ‘mental health’. It will arrive as another increment of distrust among voters who tested the system at the worst moment of their lives and found it hollow. It will arrive through the young, who carry the highest distress burden, who watched services fail their friends, and who are already walking away from the major parties in numbers we have never seen. It will arrive in the outer suburbs and the regions, where the services were thinnest to begin with.
A population this uncomfortable in its own mind is not a niche constituency. It is the electorate. The first party that treats mental health as core economic and social infrastructure, funded like roads and hospitals rather than announced like festivals, will be speaking to a need almost every household in the country privately understands. Until then, the political class will keep playing its game of ignorance. The public stopped playing years ago.
Kos Samaras
Kos Samaras is a director at RedBridge Group, a research and strategy firm specialising in public opinion, social trends, and behavioural insights. He works across industry, government, and media to help organisations understand community attitudes and navigate complex social and political environments.