The Morrison Government will invest $9 million to boost mental health support for young Australians through Orygen’s National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health.
The funding will support Orygen work in delivering more research to support better services and treatment for young people, as well as the development of new clinical services, education and training.
Giving greater support to young Australians with a mental health illness is a priority of the Federal Government.
We will also provide $660,000 to support development of a new National University Mental Health Framework to protect students’ mental health.
The framework will provide guidelines and standards to help all Australian universities to create positive learning environments which prevent mental health issues and poor education outcomes.
It will also strengthen connections between universities and community mental health services in relation to care and treatment for students who do experience mental illness.
While the framework will be voluntary, all universities will be encouraged to adopt it to reduce the number of students who drop out or get poor results mainly due to psychological distress or mental illness.
It will help to increase the awareness of mental health issues in all universities, improve their responses to mental ill-health, and make it easier for students to seek help and receive early intervention.
Orygen’s 2017 report on the mental health of Australian university students reported that at least one in four students aged between 15 and 24 experienced mental ill-health in any given year, resulting in social and economic costs to the community and the education and health systems.
The Federal Government has funded Orygen since 2014 to operate the National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health.
We are also contributing $5 million to complete work on building Orygen’s new integrated health care and transitional research facility in Melbourne. The new facility will increase Orygen’s capacity to turn research evidence into better mental health treatment and prevention.
Improving mental health services is a key pillar of the Government’s long term national health reform plan and today’s announcement builds on the Government’s record levels of investment in mental health, including an additional $338 million announced in the 2018-19 Budget.