Luke Grant is joined by Pete Shmigel, former senior state & federal political advisor and CEO of Lifeline Australia, to discuss the growing mental health impacts of COVID-19 policies & the need for smarter approaches.

“Yes, lockdowns are an unfortunate inevitability in the absence of other strategies. I hope they contain numbers. But, the picture that’s emerging from the experiment is that, the less discriminating a lockdown, the bigger its ancillary impacts appear to be”, says Mr Shmigel.

“In Sydney’s sixth week of harder lockdown, we saw Lifeline record its highest number of calls on a single day with 3345 on Monday. The figure had been climbing throughout July during which Sydney was locked down.”

“During my own time as Lifeline’s CEO, I watched our national call numbers on a daily basis and never saw them climb over 2500 or so. So, the “growth” (for lack of a more empathetic term) is profound and profoundly frightening.”

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