Mental health maths doesn’t add up

September 12, 2026 — 5:00am

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Languishing too long in emergency departments is a matter of life and death for people with acute mental health conditions, a reality Dr Mark Putland and his colleagues today make desperately clear.

The Age today reveals that fewer than half the patients with conditions serious enough to require a specialist mental health bed can get one within eight hours of arriving at Victoria’s emergency departments because those beds simply do not exist.

Five years after a royal commission provided a blueprint to rebuild Victoria’s broken mental health system, official data tracking shows even more patients are now stuck waiting for a dangerously long time in chaotic and unsettling emergency departments. As Putland, the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine’s Victorian branch chair, and his medical colleagues point out, EDs are one of the last places people who are acutely mentally ill should be treated.

Yet more concerning is that the distressing scenes playing out in the state’s emergency departments are only the visible tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, the real failures crippling Victoria’s mental health system are murkier and harder to track.

Just two of 21 mental health centres meeting key benchmarks

They include a lack of accessible community services, so people do not become so unwell they need a hospital bed, and then a lack of specialist and........

© The Age