The following motion was passed at the HSU#4 AGM on Wednesday evening:

Professor Patrick McGorry, professor of youth mental health at the University of Melbourne and Australian of the year in 2010, described Australian’s Asylum Seeker detention centres as ‘factories for producing mental illness’.

Research carried out in 2006 by the Psychiatric Research and Teaching Unit of the Liverpool Hospital (NSW) into the impact of immigration detention and temporary protection on the mental health of asylum seekers found that:

Past immigration detention and ongoing temporary protection each contributed independently to risk of ongoing post traumatic stress disorder, depression and mental health-related disability. Longer detention was associated with more severe mental disturbance, an effect that persisted for an average of 3 years after release.

We, as psychologists and other health professionals, take a stand against practices that increase the incidence of mental illness in the community by calling for an end to the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and calls on the Federal Government to respect the recent High Court decision and abandon offshore processing of asylum seeker claims and adopt a policy of onshore processing only.

We ask our Union Officials to forward this motion to the relevant government bodies and promote actions may lead to an end to mandatory detention.