Introduction
Drawing on lived experience, our inclusive research team identified mental health as a priority topic
‘We know people with disability have much higher rates of depression and poorer self-rated mental health.’
Reflection from inclusive research team member
For some people, a mental health condition is their main disability. For others, mental health conditions exist alongside another disability. These can affect each other: for example, barriers linked to disability can affect mental health, and mental health challenges can affect daily life and wellbeing. To explore this topic, our inclusive research team used the National Disability Data Asset (NDDA) disability flags and linked data from the National Health Data Hub (NHDH).
For now, disability is represented as a flag in the NDDA by people accessing government disability supports. While this flag does not include everyone in Australia with disability, it is a good starting point for exploring how people with disability use mental health services. You can read more about Doing inclusive research, What is the NDDA? and How people with disability are represented in this report.
This work is important because the mental health needs of people with disability are often not adequately considered or addressed when systems and services are designed.
We started by exploring mental health care at public hospitals for people with disability who access government disability supports. We will be looking at the use of other mental health supports and patient journeys through mental health services in future reports in the Shaping Change series.
This report does not examine outcomes by disability type. Mental health care experiences and need may vary between people with psychiatric or psychosocial disability and people with a different primary disability. The proportion of people with different types of disability varies by support type. These differences are not captured in this analysis.
‘There are a lot of people in mental health crisis at the moment because of possible changes to [National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)] or other supports. Lack of information on one hand and information overload about constant changes on the other. That is an interaction pretty unique to people with disability - the stress of your support changing or disappearing and how life altering that will be.’
Reflection from inclusive research team member