How Do I Know If I Have Experienced or Witnessed Preventable Harm?
You may have experienced or witnessed preventable harm if you’ve been through or watched someone else deteriorate emotionally or physically after being unable to access timely or appropriate mental health support. It’s important to know that every story is valid and matters, and the impact from your or someone else’s experience doesn’t solely depend on its ‘objective’ severity.
Preventable harm can look like many different things, including:
Worsened mental health or increased risk of harm while waiting to access public mental health treatment.
Increased self-harm or suicide risk after being turned away or sent home too early from inpatient psychiatric care
Physical illness, injury, or disability which could have been prevented if you had enough mental health support in place
Worsened mental health because you couldn’t see a NSW Staff Specialist Psychiatrist in a timely or consistent manner
Experiencing financial distress after being forced to turn to private mental healthcare, because timely, appropriate, or consistent mental health resources weren’t available in NSW’s public mental health system
Worsened mental health or increased risk of harm if you are/were a minor (under 18) and you couldn’t access mental health support from a specialised child and youth mental health team during crisis.
Being treated by first responders with limited understanding of mental illness during a mental health crisis, causing avoidable emotional or physical injury
If you became acutely unwell after not being able to access appropriate or timely mental health support, and were then only offered or forcibly treated with “last-line” treatments known that are known to be invasive or traumatic invasive, including: chemical sedation, mechanical restraints, forced removal of clothing, placement in isolation, or loss of contact with outside world for extended periods of time.
Experiencing compassion fatigue, burnout, or reduced mental wellbeing as a healthcare worker due to the lack of resourcing, staffing, or funding allocated to NSW’s public mental health system. Or alternatively, if you felt your performance as a healthcare worker declined due to these above constraints.
NOTE: this must be in response to challenges unique or significantly worse in NSW’s Mental Health Sector. However, it still applies if you work in other areas of healthcare (including for the NGO or private sector) but experienced secondary/ripple-on effects from it.