POLICIES RELATED TO MENTAL HEALTH IN AUSTRALIA

Running head: POLICIES RELATED TO MENTAL HEALTH, IN AUSTRALIA
POLICIES RELATED TO MENTAL HEALTH, IN AUSTRALIA
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1POLICIES RELATED TO MENTAL HEALTH, IN AUSTRALIA
Abstract
Mental health problems are prevalent in Australia and studies suggest that with each passing
day the people getting affected mentally is drastically increasing. The government is trying to
control the situation by taking various measures and coming up with various policies. In this
paper some of the main policies related to mental health have been discussed highlighting
their key principles along with the objectives. The key theme of all these policies has been
identified and some limitations to the study have also been discussed. The paper concludes by
summarizing the major findings and providing certain recommendations.

2POLICIES RELATED TO MENTAL HEALTH, IN AUSTRALIA
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Research question:.................................................................................................................4
Research Design and Methods...................................................................................................4
Summary of the research design............................................................................................4
Data collection.......................................................................................................................5
Data analysis..........................................................................................................................6
Ethical issues..........................................................................................................................6
Results........................................................................................................................................7
Coding framework for the purpose of document analysis...................................................11
Key themes...........................................................................................................................15
Explanation of figures or graphs or tables...........................................................................16
Discussion................................................................................................................................17
Limitations:..........................................................................................................................18
Conclusion................................................................................................................................18
Recommendations....................................................................................................................19
References................................................................................................................................20

3POLICIES RELATED TO MENTAL HEALTH, IN AUSTRALIA
Introduction
Australians have been affected by mental health illness and this has been impacting
their lives to a great extent. Studies suggest that almost 3% of the Australians are
experiencing severe recurrent illness and almost 45 % of them are affected by mental health
illness at some point or other in their life (Dawson et al., 2015). The government of Australia
has come up with various policies to check on the mental illness of its people. The policies
are introduced in a hope that the country’s mental health system will show significant
improvements. These policies are work towards ensuring Australia has a sound mental health
system that can detect as well as intervenes early in illness thereby promoting recovery.
These policies also ensure that every Australian suffering from mental illness has access to
proper treatment and support of the community so that they recover at a faster rate. From
various studies it can be said that the young population has limited access to the health
services and the fact is that mental health issues are seen more amidst this age group. It can
be said that the increasing mental health issues in the young generation is the reason why
government is taking vitals steps to enhance the policies or set down new policies. The future
of any country is in their youth and thus it can be said that the government is coming up with
initiatives to save the future of their country (Rikkers, Lawrence, Hafekost & Zubrick, 2016).
The analysis of the existing policies is important as if these policies would have 100 percent
effective there would not have been increasing number of mental health illness cases.
Studies talk about mental health illness in the entire population of the country but
there is not many that focus on the most affected group that is the youth of Australia. Thus
this study aims to figure out as to what extent the mental health policies in Australia address
to the needs of young people.

4POLICIES RELATED TO MENTAL HEALTH, IN AUSTRALIA
Research question:
How effective are the Australian mental health policies in catering to the needs of the
younger generation of the country?
Research Design and Methods
Summary of the research design
In this research, qualitative research design has been selected and findings are based
on the same. Qualitative research design helps in determining relationship in between the data
that has been gathered and the observations that are based up on mathematical calculations.
The research question considered here is how the mental health policies that have been
brought in Australia helping out the youths there which requires proper analysis of the
policies. It is only through proper analysis of these policies that it can be understood whether
they are effective enough to fight the growing mental illness scenario in the country.
Qualitative research design in this research will help in getting the answer to the “how” in the
research question (Kumar, 2019). The project I undertook was to thoroughly analyze the
existing mental health policies prevalent in Australia from the existing sources so that I can
get an answer to my research question. The descriptive research design can be said to be as
the sub category of qualitative research design that has been adhered to while conducting the
research (Hair et al., 2015). I was interested only in proper description of the situation or the
case that is policies related to mental health and their effectiveness amidst the youth of
Australia. As different policy analysis has been done in this research this research design was
thought to be appropriate for the purpose. It provided me with insights as to how these
policies are reaching to the youth or are they failing in serving their purpose. Mental health
illness is a serious problems and it is no more an individual problem as if majority of a
country’s population is suffering from this then a lot of things get affected. To analyze how

5POLICIES RELATED TO MENTAL HEALTH, IN AUSTRALIA
these policies are working towards ensuring that this problem gets uprooted needs to be
researched on and thus qualitative research designs was selected. Unlike quantitative research
design it is no rigid and considers people’s attitudes (Flick, 2015). This provides depth as
well as details into the matter which was necessary in this context as the policy were to be
analyzed. Selecting this research design I was benefitted with much number of potential
points of data.
Data collection
There are two different methods of data collection that is primary and secondary
methods of data collection. In this research, the secondary data collection method was chosen
as according to me it goes well with my research aim. In other words, the aim of the research
requires analyzing various mental health related policies thus in order to understand these,
secondary research was carried out. Various sources and journal were referred to find out the
details of the policies so that it can be understood what these policies have for the youth of
Australia those who are suffering from mental health (Silverman, 2016). While searching for
the resources, the research question was always kept in mind and in order to get the
appropriate source keywords or it can be said the key phrases that were used to search the
content were:
1. Mental health policies in Australia
2. Top 5 health policies related to mental health in Australia
While searching for the policies it was taken care of that these are specifically related to
mental health illness and are the policies laid down by the Australian government. I even
tried out at the official website of the Australian government hoping to find the policies on
the website but I did not get any but found that there is a separate page for the mental health
on the website with the various government resources listed that can assist an individual with