Capturing the Economic Value of Psychosocial Support
Last week, the Lived Experience and Community-Managed Alliance Parliamentary Breakfast brought together community leaders from across the country with a shared commitment to shaping a mental health system that recognises the full context of people’s lives, including their social and emotional wellbeing.
Co-hosted by the Indigenous Australian Lived Experience Centre, National Mental Health Consumer Alliance, Gayaa Dhuwi (Proud Spirit) Australia, Mental Health Carers Australia, and Community Mental Health Australia, the event was the culmination of the collaborative working partnership between the organisations. The 31 March 2026 breakfast was the first time the five national peak organisations came together to lead an event at Parliament House in Canberra.
Together, they bring perspectives shaped by the lived experience of consumers, their families, carers and kin, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledge and community-led service delivery. While each of them comes from a different place, this coming together reflects a shared commitment to shaping a mental health system that supports people as whole human beings, within families, communities and cultures.
Across their collective work, they have consistently advanced the importance of a mental health system that is relational in design, culturally informed, community-based and grounded in lived experience. At this event, that shared understanding was strengthened by new economic analysis presented by one of Australia’s leading economists, Professor Paul Flatau from the Centre for Social Impact UWA .
Capturing the Economic Value of Psychosocial Support
This discussion paper examines the role of psychosocial support within Australia’s mental health system and reviews existing economic evidence on its impact. While available Australian evidence suggests psychosocial supports contribute to improved mental health, social outcomes, and broader economic benefits, the evidence base remains limited and underdeveloped, particularly in terms of robust economic evaluation.
The paper identifies a lack of agreed definitions, conceptual frameworks, and system‑level assets to support consistent implementation, measurement, and evaluation of psychosocial supports. It concludes that stronger investment is needed in defining, mapping, and evaluating psychosocial programs, including comprehensive economic evaluation, to better capture their mental health, social, and economic value.
Psychosocial support are non-clinical programs that facilitate recovery in the community for people experiencing mental illness. Psychosocial supports cover a broad range of domains: accessing and maintaining housing and employment, making friends, or sustaining positive relationships, hobbies, and interests.
Key findings
- Economic evaluations of psychosocial support programs that do exist show strong results in terms of value and cost offsets.
- There is a very limited number of economic evaluation studies of psychosocial support.
- Systemic factors seem to be limiting effective economic evaluation.
