@ISIDEWITHQuestionsHealthcareStarted 11yrs agoActive 1mo ago

Should the government increase funding for mental health research and treatment?

Since 2009 federal funding for mental health has increased over the past seven years by $1.5 billion. Australia spends 8% of it’s health budget on mental health services. This is less than the majority of developed countries who spend between 12% and 18% of their budget on mental health. Proponents of more spending on mental health point out that schizophrenia is a major problem in Australia’s Aboriginal communities where it is three times higher than in cities.

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Answer Overview

Response rates from 232k Australia voters.

91%
Yes
9%
No
82%
Yes
9%
No
9%
Yes, our mental healthcare system needs more funding to provide a higher quality of care and services
0%
No, incentivise private companies to address this issue instead
0%
Yes, but only increase funding for personalised care instead of subsidising pharmaceutical companies
0%
No, and too many people are abusing the system by making false disability claims
0%
No, and the government should not be involved in healthcare

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Other Popular Answers

Unique answers from Australia voters whose views went beyond the provided options.

 @4Z87MLMfrom Queensland  answered…4yrs4Y

If they re-introduced the Bible we would have far less mental health problems!

 @5G3N99Vanswered…4yrs4Y

This issue runs back to basics. Early childhood is where a majority of issues stem. Relieve pressure on families and a lot of mental health care issues are removed

 @4THNSYZfrom Victoria  answered…4yrs4Y

Don't really care about this, most nutcases bring it upon themselves by abusing drugs.

 @4WTTYNJfrom Victoria  answered…4yrs4Y

No, Introduce a policy of euthanasia to improve our gene pool

 @4ZG2RJBfrom Victoria  answered…4yrs4Y

More research should be done into food interaction with mood

 @4ZFNRLDfrom Western Australia  answered…4yrs4Y

Yes there needs to be more funds allocated for better treatment. The research is already out there. 93% of people in mental institutions don't belong the as they are suffering from sub-clinical nutritional deficiencies.

 @4VC2SDDfrom New South Wales  answered…4yrs4Y

people need to take control of their own mind

 @4ZDSBX6from Victoria  answered…4yrs4Y

I would prefer to see a question that asks me if I'd like to increase the funding into research for childhood cancers. If I can lose my 5 year old niece to a brain tumour that has NO federal funding for research and also has a 0% survival rate, suggests to me that something is wrong with where we allocate research funding.

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 @SeahorseFrankie from Illinois linked…1yr1Y

AI predicts when you will die

Researchers have developed an algorithm that uses the story of a person's life to predict their future and it is accurate about 78 per cent of the time.They now have a model that understands everyday language and can guess at things like if someone might die young or how much they could earn in their lifetime.The study shows being a boy, having mental health problems or working skilled jobs can mean shorter lifespans, while earning lots of money or leading other people can add years to your life. The system, life2vec, treats each part of your life story like bits in a sentence to guess what's coming up based on whats already happened.Scientists have developed a new AI system called life2vec that uses data from 2008 to 2016 to predict simple questions like "death within four years?" for any given person. Scarily enough, it correctly guessed who would die by 2020 over three-quarters of the time.Sune Lehmann, the lead researcher, says that the system isn't open to the public or companies, to meet GDPR standards and keep private information safe: "We are actively working on ways to share some of the results more openly, but this requires further research to be done in a way that can guarantee the privacy of the people in the study."The report was published in Nature Computational Science. Sune Lehmann, a professor at Denmark Technical University, explained how life2vec works. He said it's similar to language models like ChatGPT: it learns from a vast amount of pre-existing written data, except life2vec is taught using data from people's lives.Sentences like "In September 2012, Francisco received twenty thousand Danish kroner as a guard at a castle in Elsinore" or "During her third year at secondary boarding school, Hermione followed five elective classes." were given different tokens by the scientists. These pieces of data were all mapped out in relation to each other.

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