What NZ would look like if we didn't have enough psychologists?

There are hundreds of people who take their life each year, but there are thousands more who contemplate it, get help and recover.

But new data released to RNZ’s Nine to Noon shows psychologists and psychiatrists are "leaving in droves", indicating that there won’t be enough to support the worsening mental health situation.

Shaun Robinson, CEO of Mental Health Foundation, worries that if nothing changes, New Zealand’s mental health situation in 2030 will be more “dire” than it is now.

“People who specialise in working with young people, we have less than half the recommended number for the New Zealand population, so actually, the crisis is already here.

“If we are continuing to lose people, then it's only going to get worse.”

Last week Health New Zealand released an updated plan to grow the mental health and addiction workforce.

Minister Matt Doocey said the frontline workforce had grown by about 10 percent over the past year and there had been good progress in areas such as clinical psychology.

He said the government was on track to double the number of clinical psychologists trained in the country.

The Mental Health and Wellbeing’s 2023/2024 report shows psychological distress is climbing and there is an unmet need for mental health and addiction care.

In June 2023, over 51,000 patients had waited four or more months for their first specialist assessment, according to the Ministry of Health, and by February 2025, that number jumped to more than 74,000.

At a seminar that Robinson earlier in November, a panel of young people revealed that people have “essentially given up” on the long waitlists.

“[They’re] giving each other advice over social media on how to deal with their mental health problems, including some very dangerous things such as how to use different prescription medications to fake self-harm so that they go further up the waiting list. So we are already in an extremely dire situation.”

The government has increased the pipeline for clinical psychologists and the University of Canterbury has increased their intake of clinical psychology students by 26 spaces.

Psychologist Dr Leigh Anderson told RNZ’s Nine to Noon that there are still some challenges to navigate.

“As with psychiatry, psychologists require supervision and supervision from experienced colleagues and when they don't exist in a workforce, then who can provide that oversight, support and guidance, which is useful for the clinician, but also for the people that they're working for as they develop and extend their skills?”

The workforce is on the older end of the scale with the three largest age brackets sitting between 50 – 64 years, Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists statistics show.

“And we're glad that they continue to work. But if they didn't, we'd be in real strife,” Dr Hiran Thabrew, chair of the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists of NZ, told RNZ.

“We know that some of them are leaving for retirement, understandably, but we're also losing a lot of younger psychiatrists because of burnout, which is very unfortunate.”

Figures released to Nine to Noon by Health NZ under the Official Information Act, show that at the end of June 2025 there were 116.1 full time equivalent vacancies for psychiatrists in the public health system, an increase from 93.5 at the end of June last year.

Vacancies for full-time clinical psychologists were 85.9 FTE, up from 72.4 last year.

Thabrew says the data lags behind the current state but is certain that “resignations seem to be outpacing recruitment”.

And regardless of the $60.1 million funding increase to improve a “fragmented” system, Thabrew is concerned about retaining psychiatrists in New Zealand.

“They seem to be leaving in droves and that's having a knock-on effect in terms of how many psychiatry trainees we can supervise, but also more broadly, how many medical students we can support in psychiatry placements during their basic training?”

Anderson says it is really difficult to attract clinical psychologists and retain them in the public sector. Pay is not the only reason.

“It is far from the main reason for the difficulty attracting and retaining staff. Many of the services where psychological therapies could be useful, there is no space, essentially, for psychological therapy.”

“Suicide is obviously at the highest end of those risks and what we certainly are seeing is that we are not making a dent in our very high rates of suicide,” Robinson says.

In the 2024/2025 financial year, there were 630 suspected self-inflicted deaths in Aotearoa. Of those, 474 were male. Māori males were affected twice as much than non-Māori.

The number of people who sought help by a psychologist or counsellor had increased by 46 percent in one year - Wāhine Māori and females aged 15-24 were the highest groups.

While men see higher rates of suicide, Robinson says, women tend to have higher rates of distress.

The Mental Health Foundation’s Robinson is frustrated about rangatahi not getting enough support and is calling for urgent action on youth mental health.

“We do nothing specific for young people. It is a national disgrace," he says.

“What we have seen is the number of young people in significant mental distress has nearly doubled in the last 10 years and yet they have the lowest access to services of any population group because of that lack of specialist support as well as many other failings throughout the system to address young people's needs.

“We are all supposedly as a nation concerned about young people's safety, yet the system seems to be blind to the fact that young people in particular are the biggest part of the mental health need.”

He says takatāpui, people with disabilities, Māori, and young people often have a low trust of the current system.

“Not surprisingly, because people don't take their needs seriously.

“They will tend to have a lot more things that put pressure on their mental health and therefore have higher needs [but we] have a system that has not really geared itself to these specific requirements.”