Half of all visits to GPs involve mental illness. And four in 10 residents of aged care facilities receive no visitors. Loneliness, research has shown, has as big an impact on health and mortality as smoking, obesity and high blood pressure. This is an issue that should be carefully analysed by the aged care royal commission announced in recent days by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Mental ill-health is the condition GPs treat more than any other, according to a survey by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, yet consultations are expected to be undertaken in only six minutes and access to psychologists and psychiatrists is too limited, doctors say.

It’s a system that funnels about 90 per cent of funding to physical health. That would seem a false economy. The best policy, as successive governments have been told by numerous official probes, expert panels and mountains of submissions and research, is to invest more in mental health, not to cut spending on physical health.

The research by the GPs’ college should not be surprising, for as many as half of us will at some stage experience mental illness; there are as many people in Australia today with depression as there are with a common cold. There are even more with an anxiety disorder. The total at any given time is about 4 million. Only a third of the population has access to treatment and almost two-thirds of those with mental illness get no treatment.

Delivering a comprehensive report, after a probe commissioned by the federal government from the National Mental Health Commission, chairman Allan Fels and chief executive David Butt said: ‘‘There is an extraordinarily high degree of consensus as to the directions needed to create a system which promotes good mental health and wellbeing and a contributing life. Practical steps now need to be taken.’’ Too little seems to have changed. Surely there have been enough reports. Lifeline: 13 11 14