If I’m reading this right, it was spent on reactive treatment, which it turned out is nowhere near enough money to make a dent.
In the author’s opinion, if we instead put money (even as little as $20M) into wellbeing focused prevention, it would save far more money and be far more effective. But the Labour government wasn’t interested in proactive investment in wellbeing.
As someone who has been on projects that can cost $20M to decide whether to go to the pub, I am not convinced $20M actually gets you anything (and people tend to far underestimate how much things cost). However, I agree with the sentiment. Something about a gram of prevention is worth a KG of cure.
Imagine instead if 1/3 of that $2B was put into schools for specifically mental health services.
It would mean a qualified school councilor for almost every school, with a specialist team for a region. Fixing problems at source or at least making a meaningful go at fixing the problems.
$2B over 5 years, with 1/3 going to schools?
So $666M split among 374 high schools (let’s assume only high schools as there are almost 2,000 primary schools). Let’s add the composites as well, as I believe these generally include at least some of the high school years. 193 of those brings us to 567 schools.
That’s about $1.2M per school. Or about $235k per year. I’d guess that since senior counsellors earn about $100k, this should be plenty to cover one qualified school counsellor per school including both salary and extra admin costs, with extra left over so large schools could have multiple.
I think the next problem to solve is finding another 600 counsellors, but I think you may be right that this would be an effective prevention step. It’s enough money that you could bump pay by $30k as incentive and still be well within budget.
I love it when the numbers get run
Prevention is my goal.
But the 600 extra counselors is a major issue. But I would also establish a specialist team of 6-8 to take on difficult cases per region.
This approach; would pay dividends for generations.
The next challenge is how to keep accountability in politics while also incentivising polititions to think beyond the next election cycle…
Lets focus on the possible before tackling the impossible.
Mental health in New Zealand is like those “Potempkin village” life-size, 2 dimensional pictures of houses that guy went around erecting so Catherine the Great would think they were passing all these neat villages as she sailed up the river.
Articles about mental health give all these helpline numbers, which looks great, but if you actually ring them, they are too busy to answer most of the time.
I’m pretty sure I witnessed the Access and Choice programme mentioned in this article. It was this lady that you could see at the GP’s office if your spouse died and she would tell you that you had to Primal Scream and then she would demonstrate by screaming and stamping her heels.
