We Will Never Have Enough Psychologists To Fix A Broken Mental Health System. It's Time To Build Something New.

This opinion article was originally published in The Canberra Times on March 5 2025 authored by Melanie Wilde Foundation for Social Health CEO.

We will never have enough psychologists to address the mental health crisis in the ACT—or in Australia. Nearly half of Australians—11 million people—will experience mental ill health in their lifetime. One in five are struggling right now.

And sure, we could keep pretending that if we stare at the problem long enough, a million new psychologists will sprout from the ground like introspective mushrooms with strong opinions on attachment theory. But back in reality, we’ve got 3,769 psychiatrists and 31,618 psychologists nationwide. That’s nowhere near enough.

So instead of waiting for a workforce we’ll never have, it’s time to try something that might actually work. And no, it’s not another overpriced government initiative. It’s something much simpler—and far more powerful: building real community connections that prevent crises before they start.

I’ve worked across the ACT’s drug, alcohol, and mental health sectors, both professionally and as a volunteer, spending time on the ground with marginalised people. What I’ve seen is a system that treats people as if they have single-issue lives. But people don’t live inside services. They live in relationships and communities, with overlapping, messy needs that don’t fit into rigid service models imagined by bureaucrats.

In Canberra, I could narrow it down to about 1,500 people who are on the client books for nearly every service. These are people navigating drug and alcohol rehab alongside mental health support, seeking youth services for their kids while needing housing assistance, or relying on family violence services as well as food relief.

Each service gets funding to fix one fragment of a person’s life, but few are designed to take in the whole picture. Instead, we’ve built a bloated mess of disconnected services—each with its own office, rent, HR team, and admin, duplicating effort but failing to work together. Many struggle to scale up due to governance challenges and stretched leadership. With such siloed, small-scale approaches, there’s no space to think big or build something better.

So the most vulnerable bounce between community services, hospitals, police, courts, and crisis housing, keeping emergency systems overloaded and budgets spiraling. This in turn pushes those seeking mental health care to the last place they should be: our emergency departments. The system burns out healthcare workers and leaves psychologists and psychiatrists drowning in preventable cases.

This isn’t a system worth saving. It needs reinvention.

The recent resignation of 190+ psychiatrists in NSW was another symptom of a fragmented, reactive system. Mental health doesn’t have the structured workforce of traditional healthcare, where specialists are backed by GPs, nurses, and personal care attendants. Beyond psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, the workforce is poorly defined.

Take the so-called “peer workforce.” Governments love it because it looks innovative and cheap—but there’s little solid evidence that it actually works the way they hope. While structured peer support models have been effective in some settings, government-driven programs often turn peer work into a bureaucratic checkbox rather than a genuine source of care. Real connection doesn’t come from paid strangers checking a box. It happens when people show up for each other because they actually care.

But true peer-driven recovery communities are different. These aren’t ill-defined government-funded roles — they’re organic, community-led spaces where people support each other as equals, not as service users or paid workers.

Connection-based care works because it taps into what people actually need: relationships, purpose, and belonging. We saw this during the Covid lockdowns - when formal services struggled to keep up, it was communities caring for each other that really built resilience. The UK’s Chatty Café Scheme and National Lottery Fund show how small investments in grassroots initiatives can build and sustain these kinds of networks.

The Federal Government’s national plan to end suicide-related harm recognises that strong communities are the missing piece in mental health care. It finds that suicide has surged over the last decade – especially among men, who make up 75% of all suicide deaths. Young men (20–24) are dying at rates climbing back toward 1990s peaks. Middle-aged men (45–49) account for the largest share of male suicides.

The increased suicide rates are not being driven by a lack of access to mental health care – in fact, of those who die by suicide, 80% were mental health clients in the past year. A quarter visited a mental health service in their final month. Psychologists and psychiatrists do incredible, life-saving work. But as they’ll be the first to tell you, therapy and medication aren’t miracle cures. And, as the national plan recognises: the greatest driver of suicide is social disconnection. And the most powerful protective factor is a sense of belonging.

We need to think differently.

Imagine a system where our best mental health professionals aren’t drowning in preventable cases but focused on those who need them most. Where a 40-something man on the edge finds connection before crisis. Where a struggling parent has someone to turn to—not just a service to navigate.

When we invest in communities, we create a safety net that no fragmented system ever could—a web of real human connection that catches people before they fall.

That’s how we get better care, smarter spending, and a system that actually works.

Because in the end, it’s not services that save us. It’s each other.