It has been a turbulent time for politicians, their families and high-level employees in the Southern Downs and Tenterfield recently. Elections have been lost, contracts terminated and the stress takes its toll.
Indications of mental health crises, normally private within families, have been shared on social media causing, no doubt, high levels of grief and embarrassment to those involved.
State MP James Lister told The Town & Country Journal that his long and frequent absences from home in order to represent the people of the Southern Downs in Brisbane has an impact on his family. His story would be replicated by the thousands with regional politicians across Australia.
Very little research has been done on the mental well being of regional politicians in Australia, and none could be found on the mental health of children and partners of elected officials. Yet, there is awareness. In 2022, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association published a Mental Health Toolkit for Commonwealth Parliaments to advise and assist state parliaments dealing with the emotional wellbeing of their members.
“There is an urgent need for the recognition of the need for support structures and adaptations to the job, as well as raising awareness of coping strategies,” an academic study, Governing Under Pressure, stated in 2018.
“Relatively little work has been done concerning their wellbeing and psychological health. There are unique, as well as universal, stressors that impact upon politicians; a neglect of these issues has profound consequences for those individuals and wider democracy,” the authors continued.
Politicians, let alone their partners, are more vulnerable to emotional swings and mental ill-health than others. Dr Ashley Weinberg’s work on Westminster MPs in the last decade has demonstrated the intense pressure that MPs have to withstand in their ordinary working lives while they are in office, and its psychological ill effects on many of them.
Jane Roberts, author of Losing Political Office, highlights the strains of holding office and the high levels of depressive episodes that “many politicians experience when they leave office.” Ms Roberts describes the secretive nature of mental illness in the families of public figures saying that “it was almost as though they were lepers’.
“Politicians are elected to represent us. We have a relationship with them. We can ill-afford not to think about either the conditions in which they serve us in office, or the manner in which we summarily dismiss them from that same office. After all, it might be you or me.”
