Victoria’s low availability of public psychiatric beds and the impact on patients, carers and staff

For decades, governments in high-income countries have made savings by moving long-term responsibilities for severe mental illness (SMI) to unpaid informal carers. As governments closed beds in standalone mental hospitals, financial and emotional burdens were shifted to the families of people with SMI. While community teams offer first-line treatment by visiting patients at home, carers often do the bulk of the work, spending an average of 5–6 hours per day supporting a relative with SMI, saving governments the cost of providing comparable care and accommodation (Yesufu-Udechuku et al., 2015). These daily demands increase the stress on families with deleterious effects on carers’ health, wellbeing, occupational status and finances (Yesufu-Udechuku et al., 2015).