The 2026 census was taken on Tuesday, and mental health experts expect it to show a rise in the number of Australians reporting mental health conditions. The state’s great counting machine has only asked people about long-term health issues for the second time, turning private distress into another data point for statisticians while the conditions themselves keep grinding on.
Who Gets Counted
Mental health conditions were the most reported long-term health diagnosis in the 2021 census, when about one in 11 Australians said they had a long-term mental health condition. At that time, the highest rates were in the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia, where about one in 10 people lived with such conditions. The conditions can include depression and anxiety. That’s the official picture: a population under strain, neatly sorted into categories after the fact.
Biostatistician Tim Slade, from the University of Sydney's Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, said the data provided "really important information at an Australian population level for the prevalence of these conditions, and obviously tracking whether things have changed over time." He said he expected the latest census to reflect a rise in mental health reports, and added, "But we have seen an increase in the general population, the whole adult population, in mental health problems." He said, "I'm very interested in seeing these results."
Slade said mental health challenges were rising long before the COVID pandemic. He said, "In terms of mental health challenges … we were seeing a rise in mental health problems long before the COVID pandemic." He also said, "COVID has had an impact on the mental health of the population and particularly among some subgroups of the population."
Pressure, Profit, and Breakdown
Beyond Blue chief executive Georgie Harman said there had been a rise in demand for services across Australia. She said, "We know from our own data that psychological distress relating to financial pressure has been increasing over the past four years, which is an important signal given that money worries and mental health conditions can influence each other," and added, "We're also seeing increased demand for immediate support through our services, and indications that anxiety and depression symptoms may be getting more severe." The language is clinical. The reality is blunt: money pressure keeps rising, and people are showing up in worse shape.
Harman said, "The good news is that we can get onto these issues as soon as they start to emerge and take actions that prevent them from snowballing." She also said, "The census data is another useful source of information that helps many organisations make sense of what's happening and plan for the future so that the whole community benefits." That’s the reformist promise in a neat sentence: measure the damage, plan around it, and hope the whole community somehow benefits while the underlying pressures stay in place.
Steph Schmidt, a psychologist and farmer who lives in South Australia's Mid North, said, "From what I've seen on the ground, I wouldn't necessarily think that [the prevalence of mental health conditions] is going to have gone down a whole lot in the last couple of years." She said, "It's an ongoing issue, whether you are rural, whether you are urban." The suffering doesn’t respect the tidy lines drawn by institutions. It spreads across country and city alike.
What the Census Can’t Fix
Schmidt said, "It's only capturing those that are diagnosed as well, so it is tricky," and, "On the other hand, it's also helpful to, I guess, discriminate almost between getting the diagnosis and self-diagnosis." She said, "Things like the census and the responses that come through I hope do help inform where some of that money goes and the services that are supported," and, "I think that's where it is really important to answer honestly with where your experience has been so that it can help government, or also even charities and non-government organisations to direct where supports are put."
That’s the whole apparatus in miniature: people are asked to report their pain honestly so government, charities and non-government organisations can decide where support gets placed. Support organisations hope the results will provide new insights into how mental health services should be distributed. The census may map the crisis. It won’t end the conditions that keep producing it.