‘People are walking around with really high levels of distress’: Australia’s regional mental health plight
Celina Ribeiro
Dr Katherine Graham has been a GP in Horsham for 12 years now. It’s a market town in the Wimmera region, about halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide; one of those larger-sized rural towns where people within a two-hour radius come to do the big shop. It’s surrounded by agriculture: cropping, sheep, cattle.
There are about 20,000 people in Horsham, but tens of thousands more from surrounding areas use the town as a hub for their health care. For those people Horsham does not offer much if their mental health requires care.