'Hidden' costs of mental health proves a website hit

Jul 04, 2007

An online article which examines claims of poor accounting used in determining costs of mental health has proven a hit among web users.

Dr Ciorstan (Kitty) Smark's article entitled, "Costing schizophrenia" is ranked in the top group of most downloaded articles in the latest issue of Accounting Forum.

Dr Smark, a Senior Lecturer in the University of Wollongong's School of Accounting and Finance, said she was surprised and proud to learn that her article was proving so popular.

Her article, which is an abridged version of her PhD, appears online at the ScienceDirect (Accounting Forum) website

Launched in the mid 1970s, Accounting Forum is a refereed quarterly business journal published by the School of Commerce, University of South Australia. The journal has gained recognition at the national and international level.

The journal is aimed at precipitating a greater understanding of the ways in which business works in the global environment. It provides a forum for intellectual exchange of academic research in business fields, especially in the accounting profession.

Dr Smark's article looks at the expensive costs involved in dealing with schizophrenia.

She argues that some costs - the direct ones - are far more visible than others, particularly the indirect ones.

Her article points out: "Accounting makes some costs visible (or 'inscribed'); whereas, other costs are silenced. Sometimes they are silenced by being outside accounting's 'entity assumption'; sometimes they are silenced by being difficult to quantify."

In either case, her article shows that by inscribing some costs and ignoring others, accounting practices privilege direct, quantifiable costs above other costs.

"From the viewpoint of social accounting, this failure to balance and consider all stakeholders constitutes flawed accounting," Dr Smark said.

The object of her paper was to investigate the extent to which healthcare reform (particularly that relating to mental health) in Australia has reduced the field of the visible because it is reinforcing a more "corporate" view of the provision of healthcare services.

Dr Smark completed her PhD in the area of accounting's role in deinstitutionalisation from mental hospitals in NSW. Her late uncle, John Gordon Collins, lived bravely with schizophrenia for many years.