A university researcher has labelled most mental health professionals working in rural and regional parts of Tasmania culturally incompetent while appearing at a parliamentary inquiry.
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Mental health professional Tamara Reynish, who appeared before the Legislative Council select committee on rural health on Thursday, told the inquiry about her research project on the mental health of East Coast LGBTIQA+ Tasmanians.
She said her research showed the study's participants generally had poor mental health, very high psychological distress and low resilience.
Ms Reynish said their access to mental health care and the treatment received was reported to be poor.
"Almost 100 per cent of my participants who accessed health care ran into barriers of some kind or another, which impeded their access to care, their ability to get quality care, and again, harmed their mental health," she said.
"My results also show that psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and social workers in rural remote Tasmania are, for the most part, culturally incompetent.
"That is to say they're untrained and biased against people with alternate sexualities and genders or people who work in the sex industry."
Ms Reynish said some mental health professionals were openly insulting, openly discriminatory, and even refused to provide care to the study's participants.
"These barriers are not only unethical, unprofessional and violate the state's anti-discrimination legislation, but they bred help-seeking avoidance and prevented people from looking for care," she said.
Ms Reynish submitted a recommendation to the committee for the government to fund a tailored mental health service headquartered in a regional part of the state, to be staffed by LGBTIQA+ people.
She said national research indicated urban-based approaches to mental health care didn't work in rural and remote areas.