Ms Kate Mitchell:

To add to Mr. Power's comments on the issues of stigma, I want to acknowledge the work of SeeChange, which runs our national stigma reduction campaign and has done significant and valuable work in terms of opening up the conversation about mental health and promoting public attitudes to mental health. SeeChange would acknowledge that while we have seen progress in terms of public attitudes, the attitudes towards more severe and less common mental health difficulties, such as schizophrenia, psychosis and bipolar are still very much lagging behind. We can see also from the National Disability Authority research on public attitudes to people with mental health difficulties that people are least comfortable working with someone with a mental health difficulty, living beside somebody with a mental health difficulty or sending their children to school with other children with mental health difficulties in comparison to any other disability group. It is very important that we keep the spotlight on stigma reduction and ensuring we are adequately investing in that issue and not just talking about more common mental health difficulties.