About a month out from the general election, the New Zealand Psychological Society hosted a debate between four parties’ mental health spokespeople. Spokespeople for Labour (Andrew Little) and National (Matt Doocey) were joined by late subs for the Greens (Jan Logie) and Act (Laura Trask).
I found the whole thing quite fascinating. Generally, everyone stuck to the rules, almost answered the questions, and generally showed a fair amount of consistency in how they saw the questions relating to psychologists and mental health more broadly.
Little and Doocey were almost, but not quite, in lockstep over their view of the major challenges, and had an impressive grasp of the general area of mental health. Doocey was surprisingly impressive, as I’ve not seen him in action before. While Little has a lot of experience as Minister of Health broadly defined, Doocey is specifically in line for a portfolio around mental health. I’m a big fan of that idea and I’d love to see future governments develop a specific mental health portfolio.
Logie did an excellent job of illustrating how different the Greens are – taking questions on specifics (quality rehabilitation in prisons?) and broadening out to systemic causes (target the poverty that sets people up for crime). Trask may not have been familiar with all of Act’s positions on the night but articulated its core mental health proposal: to empower the current Mental health and Wellbeing Commission to become a broker between those who need mental health support and providers.
Act’s mental health policy speaks several times about a lack of provider choice for mental health patients, but doesn’t explicitly note that there is no choice because everyone is overburdened. You don’t get into publicly funded care unless you’re seriously distressed, and private providers have overfull waiting lists.
From the get-go, Little and Doocey identified workforce development as a key bottleneck, and Little pledged to look into further increasing funding for the workplace-based internships that are required for training and registration as a psychologist. He noted Labour has increased the funding for internships from 12 in 2017, to 38 this year. What he, along with every other speaker, didn’t do was speak about the bottlenecks in the institutions that train our psychologists.
Let me put this in perspective for you. According to Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand, 561 doctors graduated in New Zealand. That suggests there are about 500-odd medical internships in a year, give or take. By contrast, we graduate around 60 clinical psychologists per year.
If we need 1500 doctors more than we currently have, and we need 1000 more psychologists than we currently have, I am not confident any of these parties are going to increase funding for clinical psychology training post-election. Certainly, none of them have mentioned it. Do I think either National or Labour is going to put more money into clinical psychology tertiary training when we’re seeing dramatic staffing cuts to many university programmes? Colour me sceptical.
Even so, I think there’s reason to be hopeful. While I have bagged Act leader David Seymour on occasion, he was a founder member (with Doocey, Chloe Swarbrick, Louisa Wall and Jenny Marcroft) of the cross-party Mental Health and Addictions Wellbeing Group. There are only six similar groups in our Parliament, and I’m heartened that although they have different answers to the central questions, they care enough about those questions to set aside differences. At the time, Newshub quoted him as saying “It’s a positive development and I’m more than happy to support a cross-party group that takes the politics out of it and says there’s no political debate or disagreement about the fact that we need to do better with mental health,” Hear, hear.
Meanwhile, if you can find the NZ First mental health policy, drop me a line.
