We Need Solutions To The Mental Health Crisis Beyond Therapy And Medication
This article was originally published as an opinion article in The Canberra Times on January 24, 2024 and authored by Foundation for Social Health CEO Melanie Wilde.
Nearly half of all Canberrans will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime, and one in four Australians are lonely. It's more likely that someone will die today from social isolation than smoking. So why aren't we treating this like the public health concern that it is?
We can't afford to keep treating mental health and loneliness as narrow, clinical problems that can be "fixed" with therapy or medication. We need to radically rethink the systems that shape our lives - the housing we provide, the jobs we create, the communities we build. Addressing mental health requires a broad, holistic approach that touches every aspect of life.
When you care for someone who has struggled with mental ill-health for years, you witness its cumulative toll, how it drains their energy, erodes their confidence, and shuts off opportunities that should be within their reach. I think of my mum, an incredibly intelligent woman with multiple university degrees and endless ambition, yet those achievements have never translated into a stable life. She regularly feels lonely and is in the most vulnerable population at risk of homelessness - single women over 55 with little superannuation.
Her psychosocial and physical disabilities, rooted in profound childhood trauma, have kept her on the margins. In a society that measures our value by our ability to work - and where work is often the primary path to community and belonging - people like my mum are denied the very thing that might enable healing. It becomes a self-reinforcing loop: her anxiety rises with every job interview, and each rejection pushes her further away. In the end, our society leaves her with the belief that she has no place in it.
What makes my mum's story even more heartbreaking is that it's not unique. People are more disconnected than ever, and, for those with mental ill-health, the isolation can prevent recovery. We recently polled just over 1000 ACT residents, asking them to rank what they thought was causing the national mental health crisis, and far higher than a lack of adequate services, in order, was economic hardship, overwork and social isolation.
That's our simple but radical goal at the Foundation for Social Health, a new national loneliness non-profit that I've founded - to rebuild the social bonds that hold us together, that make us not consumers or clients, but human beings. We can apply this principle to better solve our interconnected housing and cost-of-living crises.
Let's start with housing. The housing crisis is often reduced to simple terms: build more homes, lower rents, get people off the streets. But housing is about more than just a roof over someone's head - it's about creating environments where people can thrive. My mum, like many others with mental health challenges, lives alone. With no opportunity to participate in employment, and few social connections, that isolation worsens her mental health. Several times a year, she is hospitalised. Loneliness is the reason.
The happiest I recall my mum ever being was during a short stay at a residential facility, where she connected with others who also struggled with mental health. They shared meals and simple living spaces, and had access to gentle walking trails and a beautiful river. In three months, she became a different person; she made friends and started living in the present. Then she was discharged back into isolation. Later that year, she attempted suicide.
We need to think bigger when it comes to housing. What if we invested in housing models that foster connection and provide mutual support? If we designed housing where those with mental health challenges could access both a safe home and the social connection they need, we could radically transform lives. Housing could become a foundation for healing, rather than a source of isolation.
In my work with people with lived experience of mental ill-health including those in the justice system, battling addiction, or living without a home - my mother's story is echoed again and again. People don't just ask for more services or more housing. They ask for something deeper: a place to belong.
Yes, housing is essential, and services can help. But what we all need, more than anything, is community. We need friends. We need family, whether by blood or by choice. Neighbours who care. The feeling that somewhere, there are people who see us, who are with us. Not because they're paid to be, not because it's their job, but because they truly want to be there. And yet, long-term, community-based homes, the kind that briefly gave me a glimpse of my mother as she began to heal, seem to vanish as quickly as they appear.
Watching my mother navigate this world in such profound loneliness - her whole life shaped by childhood trauma that did not have to be irreparable - has been one of the deepest pains of my life. And I know that millions of other Australians have either witnessed, or personally experienced, the same journey.
When it comes to our relationship to work, and more so our obsession with overwork, one third of employees we surveyed right here in Canberra have told us that a permanent shorter work week with no loss of pay would reduce how lonely they feel and improve their mental health. More and more, workers are looking for flexibility in their hours, no longer fixed to a physical workplace, and with more time for play and connection outside of their jobs.
Previous generations led us to believe that the place to find meaning was in our career. But the things that make life worth living cannot be found in work. What we actually need is freedom from work. We can't keep cutting down the parts of life that keep us happy and healthy. Add in the hours commuting and maintaining the basics of life, and what's left? Barely any time to connect with ourselves, let alone our communities. We need to ask: What are we really spending our one wild and precious life doing, and who is benefiting from this constant grind? Today's cost-of-living crisis isn't just about rising prices - it's about the breakdown of community.
We cannot afford to wait any longer for a world that values mental health, builds communities, and designs systems that allow every person to truly belong. The future of our nation and the wellbeing of millions depends on it.