Fragmentation between services in the mental health industry has been making it harder for people to reach out for help.
Doctor of clinical psychology, Kylie Henderson, noticed this and decided to create the Humanity Health Group in 2013.
“I saw young people with drug and alcohol issues with five different workers all working with them, but no one was coordinating it,” she tells Azzet.
“I wanted to start Humanity Health Group as a way of integrating really good care into various systems so that we could coordinate services much more efficiently and effectively.”
Mental health sector growth
Humanity Health Group currently services people in Australia and the United Kingdom and has grown to eleven brands in eight years.
The estimated cost of mental ill-health in Australia is estimated to be around A$220 billion per year, and £300 billion (A$567.3 billion) per year in the UK.
Research from Murdoch University also found structural issues in Australia’s mental health system.
The research highlighted the need for increased Medicare support for mental health services and found that as mental health worsens, people’s healthcare costs rise.
Murdoch University’s College of Business associate professor Khurshid Alam said Australia underinvests in mental health care compared to global benchmarks.
“Australians face higher prevalence rates of anxiety and depression than Europe and Asia, yet Australia spends substantially less per person on mental health care compared with other high-income nations,” he said.
Henderson says the mental health sector has become a “siloed system” as structures aren’t integrated enough to give them all of the help they need.
“You might see somebody who today would go to their GP because they're feeling depressed, be referred to a psychologist who's up the road, and they'd be receiving psychological intervention, probably CBT, but the person's also not working,” she says.
“As a consequence, they get this amazing treatment from the psychologist for depression, but then the depression comes back because they're not working 12 months later.
“I think the government's had some intentions to try to look at productivity and well-being of the country, but in terms of integrating structures, we're still working towards that.”
Henderson says Humanity Health Group uses its services to help its patients across their lifespans and across the entire care sector.
“We work across both the care side of the sector, so anything from someone requiring a wheelchair prescription, or somebody needing some home modifications, or a neurodivergent young person at school needing some adaptive technology,” she says.
“It's about rebuilding capacity and capability and functional capacity to participate, or self-efficacy in themselves.”
Digital infrastructure and mental health
While AI has had adverse effects on mental health through the advent of ‘AI psychosis’, Henderson says if it is used correctly, it can boost accessibility in the sector.
“There's a good opportunity for digital health services, and I think that's going to take a number of the different departments to see digital health as an opportunity for the future,” she says.
She says she sees the stigma around digital health services falling away.
“We still have some regulations within certain departments where digital health is probably seen as a lesser level of care,” she says.
“Evidence is showing us that patients who receive digital intervention are gaining the same outcomes as long as the care is integrated.”
This includes AI, where Henderson says the technology is already being used in healthcare to assist clinicians.
While Henderson says AI and digital infrastructure are likely to become more prevalent in the mental health space, she says they would never replace real clinicians.
I think we will just make quicker, more informed decisions through data,” she says.
“It's going to allow us more time supporting people, and be able to provide that relational benefit that allied health clinicians do as well.”
Recently, a mental health platform developed by Orygen and the University of Melbourne received A$14 million in funding from Wellcome, a global charitable foundation.
The project will see Orygen Digital’s award-winning digital mental health service MOST, supercharged with the latest AI to become MOST-Nexus.
This will be the world’s first hyper-personalised and adaptive platform for youth mental health care.
According to the Black Dog Institute, experts said they see both risks and benefits in the Australian mental health sector.
