A new government report is painting a complicated picture of mental health in Australia. Yes, people are living longer. Yes, cancer survival keeps climbing. But underneath those good-news headlines, chronic illness and mental health struggles are quietly becoming the country’s biggest healthcare problem.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare dropped its Australia’s Health 2026 report on Thursday, and it’s packed with numbers that tell a pretty clear story: more Australians than ever are dealing with long-term health conditions, and it’s straining the system.
Over 15 million people, and counting
Here’s the scale of it — roughly 61% of Australians, or about 15.4 million people, were living with at least one chronic condition back in 2022. And it’s not just one thing for most of them either. Nearly four in ten Australians (38%) were juggling two or more chronic conditions at once.
The toll this takes is staggering. In 2024 alone, chronic diseases cost Australians an estimated 4.9 million years of healthy life. That’s 84% of the entire disease burden in the country coming from conditions that, by definition, don’t go away.
Dementia has overtaken heart disease
Maybe the most striking finding in the whole report: dementia is now killing more Australians than heart disease. For years heart disease held that grim top spot, but not anymore.
ABS figures from 2024 show dementia accounted for 9.4% of all deaths that year, edging out heart disease at 8.7%. And the trend lines are moving in opposite directions — dementia deaths jumped 39% between 2015 and 2024, while heart disease deaths actually dropped 18% over the same stretch.
AIHW chief executive Zoran Bolevich pointed to the obvious culprit: Australia’s population is ageing, and dementia risk climbs steeply the older people get. More people living into their 80s and 90s means more dementia cases, full stop.
Young people are struggling more than ever
The mental health numbers are just as sobering. About 22% of Australians aged 16 to 85 had experienced a mental health condition in the past year, based on 2022 data.
But it’s young people bearing the brunt of it. Back in 2007, about 26% of 16-to-24-year-olds reported a mental health condition. Now that figure sits at 39%. That’s a huge jump in less than two decades, and it points to a generation that needs a lot more support than the system is currently built to give.
Still, there’s real progress here
It’s not all bad news, though. Australians are living longer than ever — life expectancy now sits at 85.1 years for women and 81.1 for men, based on 2022–24 data.
Cancer survival has come a long way too. Back in the late 1980s and early 90s, only about half of cancer patients survived five years past diagnosis. Now that number is up to 72%.
So the picture that emerges is a bit of a paradox: better treatments and earlier detection are helping people survive things that once killed them — but more people are also living long enough, and in ways complex enough, to develop chronic and age-related conditions the system still hasn’t fully caught up to.