Demand for Lifeline services in recent weeks has reached levels previously associated only with natural disasters, Christmas and Covid lockdowns, the executive director of the helpline has said, and cost-of-living pressures are the likely cause.
Chris Siorokos said Lifeline’s three busiest days had all come in the past 12 months. The most recent surge came on Sunday 6 August, when 4,204 Australians called for support – the service’s second-busiest day ever.
The average daily call volume is now 3,000, an average of 500 more calls a day compared with 2019.
With the addition of text message and web chat services, which were scaled up to 24/7 coverage in February 2022, the daily average contacts for the year to date is about 3,680, and Siorokos said it had not been unusual for contacts to reach 4,000 a day in recent weeks.
In the past, the organisation had typically recorded its busiest days around the Christmas and new year holiday period, as well as during natural disasters and after lockdown announcements, but it was now seeing spikes outside the usual high demand days, Siorokos said.
The anecdotal evidence from Lifeline’s crisis supporters who take the calls, as well as their network of 41 in-person centres, was that more people were seeking help with rising cost-of-living concerns, Siorokos said.
“What we’re hearing from our centres is, there is a big increase of people coming in with financial issues top of mind.
“They’re seeing a different cohort of people coming in seeking financial support. They’re seeing more younger, working people with mortgages or with rent who’ve never reached out before.”
Sophie, who did not want her last name to be used, was a 20-year-old university student feeling “helpless” and struggling with suicidal ideation when she reached out to Lifeline.
“It was such a monumental thing, the buildup to dialling that number … It was really a period of suppression and not [seeking help] that I would say made it worse.”
As a full-time student with barely enough work hours to pay rent, “there was no world” in which she could have afforded to see a psychologist, she said.
Five years on, now volunteering as a crisis supporter at Lifeline, Sophie said she was increasingly hearing of financial issues directly affecting people’s mental health.
“I had someone call and they’d received their Centrelink payment, but they just couldn’t for the life of them figure out how to spend it, because of what they needed versus how much they had.”
She has also heard from people who have had to move interstate because they couldn’t afford their rent, but in doing so have moved away from their support networks.
“And then the big one is the cost of mental health care,” Sophie said.
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Anne Holmes, a financial counsellor at Lifeline, said financial stress directly caused poor mental health.
“There’s a huge link between the two,” she said. “One feeds the other. The more stressed you become, the less capable you are of working, generating money or thinking rationally about what your options are.”
In some instances, clients with diagnosed mental health conditions were choosing to skip medication, which made both their mental health and capacity to earn money worse, Holmes said.
Financial stress also affected relationships and physical health, with many people not sleeping due to stress and anxiety, she said.
Holmes said the last time demand for financial counselling was so high was during the global financial crisis. But because unemployment has remained low despite increasing cost pressures, financial counsellors have been unable to go to banks pointing out that their clients’ income would increase once they got a job, she said.
“There’s not a lot of change that clients can make, and I think that’s probably the big difference.”
Holmes said some of her clients worked full-time during the week and had two part-time jobs at the weekend.
Of the 365 people receiving income support payments surveyed in the latest report from the Australian Council of Social Services, 99% reported that the inability to cover the cost of basic goods and services had affected their mental health.
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