Among the chaos and contention surrounding the 2020 budget, one particular decision was met with fairly resounding approval. Mental health and suicide prevention were highlighted as a ‘national priority’, with the government pledging a massive $5.7 billion to be spent on mental health in 2020-21.
Part of this includes extending the allowance of Medicare-funded psychologist sessions from 10 to 20 per year and expanding the headspace network, which continues to be a particularly critical service for provision of youth mental health. There is no doubt that such a move is commendable, however, I wonder if allocating further resources to treatment is really going to be enough to stem the growing crisis, particularly among young people.
It’s worth considering that the most common psychotherapeutic paradigm that is practised and endorsed in Australia is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT. It is based on the idea that the way we think about, or ‘appraise’ situations has a powerful influence on the way we feel about them. Correspondingly, psychopathological symptoms are thought to be caused by a tendency toward unrealistically negative appraisals, which then in turn produce negative affective states, such as a depressed mood or anxious rumination.
CBT aims to break these negative thinking patterns through Socratic-style dialogue. But how helpful are therapies like CBT really going to be for dealing with the issues faced by my generation? One thing I’ve noticed among friends and acquaintances that are also in their early twenties is a pervasive sense of dread regarding the future, with catastrophic climate change being often cited as a cause of prospective chaos and destitution.
For example, one of my housemates was recently lamenting the fact that they couldn’t access their super early: ‘Civilisation will collapse before I’m 50 anyway, so I would prefer to just have the money and be able to enjoy it now’, they said. Sardonic humour like this is particularly common among people my age, and although it’s fun, I can’t help but feeling like it’s a way of coping with real possibilities.
Seeing as clinical psychology is a career path that I’ve thought about pursuing, I’ve often thought about how I might respond to such concerns within a CBT paradigm. If a patient told me they were experiencing anxiety at the prospective of mass food shortages caused by climate change, I would find it difficult to prompt a more adaptive and realistic belief. ‘Yes’, I could say, ‘but starvation shortages won’t impact