Senate Inquiry into Mental Health releases its First Report

On 8 March 2005 the Federal government appointed a Select Senate Committee of Inquiry into Mental Health in Australia. The first report of this Inquiry was released on 30 March, 2006. Apart from coverage on the 7.30 Report on ABC television and in The Australian newspaper and the Canberra Times it seems to have drawn little comment. As far as I am concerned the report is just more of the same that has been policy for over 20 years. The report is at the following link:
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/mentalhealth_ctte/index.htm

I am also enclosing correspondence which I have had with Senator Lyn Allison Democrat Senator from South Australia who chaired the Committee of Inquiry. See below.

First corro
-----Original Message-----From: Mary Lou Carter [mailto:lairymoo@bigpond.net.au] Sent: Thursday, 30 March 2006 10:58 PMTo: Allison, Lyn (Senator)Subject: Mental Health Inquiry
Dear Ms Allison

Today the report on the Senate Inquiry into Mental Health was released. No-where in the recommendations is there hope for those who are now so mentally ill that only a stint in a hospital setting surrounded by beauty, peace tranquility and professionals to care and treat them will see their sanity and well-being restored. Where is the hope for these people? I couldn't find anything for them. These are the people who have been betrayed by a deliberate, cruel and delinquent policy which never gave them a chance. Or are they to be merely forgotten, left to rot on the streets or incarcerated in the other detention centres, our gaols? Victims of the Oops factor. Where is the social justice for them, social justice being central to your philosophy, honed from your years teaching the disadvantaged? Or is social justice merely thematic?

I am absolutely appalled that nowhere in your recommendations is there a place for hospitals. Do you regard specialist psychiatric hospitals as illegitimate for people with mental illness, after all it is only an illness. If mental illness is to be rendered completely community-based, why not cancer-care or paediatric care or neo-natal care?. The suggestion, which is implicit in your report, is that one is automatically stigmatised by virtue of mental illness. What will happen to the many thousands who are now suffering acute mental illness and acute psychosis, because I can tell you there is not a psychologist alive that can talk someone out of psychosis.

If the recommendations are followed through there may be hope for the future but not for the sufferers today or tomorrow or next week or next year. I am bitterly disappointed for the thousands of families whose loved ones are lost to them thorugh this terrible scourge. If loving them were enough we'd have no need for inquiries of this kind, but they can't love them back to health. What comfort is there for these despairing families,certainly none from this report. It is the right of every citizen to health care treatment and care of the highest quality, it seems that's the case for every person except someone with mental illness.


My sister has a son who suffers mental illness, she also has a son who was an oncology patient. She asks why was every effort made in paediatric onoclogy for even the most hopeless of cases and yet her son with mental illness was told that he was not sick enough to be admitted to hospital with his mental illness. She said that the parents of children with cancer were offered hope when the mentally ill are just offered spin. I think that sums it up beautifully. Smart girl my sister.

The Senate has produced a futuristic report a pity the problems of the here-and-now were not given due consideration.

Yours faithfully


Mary Lou Carter

Response:
From: Allison, Lyn (Senator)
To: Mary Lou Carter
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2006 10:23 AM
Subject: RE: Mental Health Inquiry
Dear Ms Carter
We have indeed made recommendations for long-stay psychiatric hospitals for the chronically mentally ill. Furthermore, this is just the first report which has only those recommendations relevant to the current CoAG process (we were otherwise due to report at the end of April but brought it forward so it would be influential on that process). Another report will follow in a week or two with much more extensive recommendations.
I trust this assists.
Lyn Allison
Chair
Senate Select Committee on Mental Health

Second corro

-----Original Message-----From: Mary Lou Carter [mailto:lairymoo@bigpond.net.au] Sent: Friday, 31 March 2006 11:01 AMTo: Allison, Lyn (Senator)Subject: First report of Senate Inquiry into Mental Illness
Dear Ms Allison
Thank you for your swift response. Yes, this is indeed the case but they are long-stay hospitals for those already regarded as incurables. My concern is that there is no general acceptance that specialist psychiatric hospitals have a place in the integrated service delivery to the mentally ill. Short stays in hospital for any illness is generally accepted except it seems for the mentally ill. It is this very issue which makes mental illness something other than an illness and will continue to cause stigmatisation of the mentally ill if it is treated in a way that is markedly different for other illnesses.

This will continue until there is acceptance by policy-makers, policy-drivers, bureaucrats and politicians that specialist psychiatric hospitals are a legitimate part of the answer. They are not institutions, they are hospitals wherein a broad integrated range of rehabilitative, adaptive, pharmacological, counselling and contemplative therapies are possible. The therapeutic benefits of tranquility of setting must also be accepted because the very busy environs of general hospitals would merely exacerbate the anxiety and confusion of people with mental illness. To say that people with mental illness in a psychotic state should be subjected to waiting in an accident and emergency admission department is not only dangerous to the person with the illness but to the staff and the general public.The mentally ill must have the dignity of knowing that if they are sick they will be cared for promptly, humanely and appropriately.

Unfortunately every Inquiry in the past and they now number in double figures very little positive change was sustained at best it was sporadic and at worst it was sporadic.

I look forward to your second report. All I want is for the heartbreak for the parents and families to stop and for those with mental illness who are in crisis NOW to have a solution NOW.

I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my very emotional email it was late and I was very tearful.

Best wishes

Mary Lou Carter

Response:

From: Allison, Lyn (Senator)
To: Mary Lou Carter
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2006 12:23 PM
Subject: RE: First report of Senate Inquiry into Mental Illness
I certainly understand your concern and it is true that there were those who proposed ongoing stand alone psychiatric hospitals but most others disagreed.
Lyn

______________________________________

I find this response very disturbing because it would seem that the decision to report in the manner published was a matter of numbers rather than efficacy, that is to make things better for the mentally ill. It is mind boggling. This report seems to be just a rehash of the Not for Service report which was a moving chronical of horror and despair but which has given little in the way of hope for those depicted in those stories. What will happen to those people suffering mental illness who are completely forgotten, who suffer injustices, stigma and continuing illness.

Politics - Let's speak the language government understands

Respite services formerly provided at Greystanes House in the Blue Mountains, just outside Sydney, for families of severely/profoundly disabled people. If you look at these two items you will see the current state of play.

http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/nsw/content/2005/s1483486.htm First program broadcast October, 2005

http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/nsw/content/2006/s1585422.htm Follow up broadcast March 2006

The following is an article in the local paper, the Blue Mountains Gazette http://bluemountains.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=news&subclass=local&story_id=467708&category=general%20news&m=3&y=2006 in the Blue Mountains region just outside Sydney.

I have submitted the following response to the families:

Natasha Stott-Despoja et al decried and demonstrated at the inhumanity of detention centres. Yet where are these great humanitarians when it's our own vulnerable severely disabled who are in the new "detention" centres, the family home? The story of your families in the Blue Mountains is replicated across this state and across this country.

It is absolutely unacceptable for government to force ill-health and penury upon you while neglecting its responsibilties to provide proper services to those you love who have dependent disability.

Government just doesn't get it!! It is in the interests of every member of the community to have properly resourced and funded disability services. This would give us all the assurance that should an accident of life or of birth befall any of us, we will be cared for in a responsive and humane way. This is the mark of a civil society and honours our humanity.

Families and carers I urge you to mobilise and be heard, a political backlash is the only thing governments understand. Let's speak their language.

Opinion piece for the Australian

I submitted this little "vant" (new verb: vent + rant) to The Australian Forum column. For an idea of what I'm complaining about, check out this article in The Age by Carol Nader.

Again, they may not publish it, so here it is on the interweb. Enjoy.

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In the 1970s when the neglect and abuse of people in institutions could no longer be ignored the government responded to protect and exculpate the culprits responsible; the policy makers, bureaucrats and politicians of the day. Institutions became places of neglect and abuse directly due to their lack of funding, lack of community and government scrutiny and a "three-monkeys" approach. The abject policy failure was glossed over for almost 4 decades.

Typically, reactive policy was put in place. The de-institutionalisation / community integration policy is immaculately politically correct, but a familiar lack of funding has meant that it has exacerbated many of the problems it intended to solve. The short-comings of de-institutionalisation policy are now becoming obvious, with a "new" crisis in mental health and disabled care grabbing headlines.

Dismantling old institutions in favour of "community-based" care has in fact created for the disabled and mentally ill and their families a new form of institutionalisation; the family home. Under a community model, the home is the default site for care, with the range of support options poorly funded and inaccessible to most.

For the disabled and their families home is the new mini-institution, where isolated, unsupported and invisible they are incacerated from cradle to tomb. For the mentally ill it's the SGC outcome; Streets, Gaol and Cemetery, when are they to get hope instead of spin.

Submitted to Heckler 20.3.06

This is a little piece I wrote for the Heckler column (the everyman rant column in the Sydney Morning Herald). Because it doesn't conform to the feather-light style of the column, it won't be published. Viva l'internet.

All people are equal but some are less equal than others

Despite Human rights conventions and volumes of legislation, the intellectually disabled continue to be at the mercy of those who make decisions for them and their families. Those decisions may not, in fact, maximise the potential of the person with an intellectual disability. Every area of their physical and emotional life is affected by their compromised intellectual capacity. Rights activists and legislators cannot be satisfied that in treating those with intellectual disability as "normal" is sufficient concession to their disability when clearly, apart from being gallingly arrogant and patronising, it ill-serves and ignores the special circumstances of the intellectually disabled. For too long outcomes for the intellectually disabled have been viewed in a flattering rose-coloured light rather than the cold light of day. The path for the intellectually disabled is more precarious because their lack of capacity to rationalise, intellectualise and advocate their needs continues to exclude them from engaging in the decision-making process, to say nothing of their families who are treated appallingly.

The most telling of discriminations within disability itself is the matter of concessions. For the physically disabled with fully functioning intellect, not only are their rights to self-determination self-evident, but other similarly obvious concessions are made as a matter of course: wheelchairs, ramps, bumps on pages, companion animals, white canes, Auslan/sign for the deaf, special vision enhancers on computers etc.... the list is endless. Yet for the intellectually disabled, particularly in the mild to moderate range, few protections or concessions are made for their compromised intellectual function, they take their chances like everyone else.

I recently attended a tribunal hearing with parents and their 15 year old child with limited speech and functioning intellectually at the level of a 4-year old. The manner in which the tribunal members and the child's legal assistant addressed this young person was shocking and degrading. Absolutely no attempt was made in language or manner to accommodate this child’s compromised intellectual capacity. The child was treated like a "normal" 15-year old with fully functioning intellect.I can't imagine how the parents felt. Oh, I’m sure the letter of the law was complied with, which only makes it even more shameful and cements my view that the law is an ass bridled and led an asinine legislature. Or perhaps it is those who interpret and apply the law who are the asses. Sadly, I think it is the latter. Most alarming in the "normalisation" policy approach is the number of intellectually disabled people who are coming into contact with the criminal justice system (why are they going to gaol?). Of great concern too is the lack of viable options for the education of students with disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities, could there be a link here? At every turn students with disabilities are short-changed and their advancement and potential compromised by penny-pinching, cheapskate shitheads, sorry, I mean bureaucrats and politicians, while loving parents/carers are frustrated and powerless.
That services must maximise the potential of the person with a disability is the underpinning object of the NSW Disability Services Act.

I applaud everything that has been done for the physically disabled in maximising their potential. However, when it comes to those with intellectually disability, it is government (state and federal) which is in breach of its own legislation. This issue is now so serious it can no longer be left to the states. Our indigenous fellow citizens are provided for under a special article in our constitution, so too must our fellow citizens with disability, most especially those who cannot speak for or care for themselves.

welcome to the moo

I'm the mother of a disabled child, and not only do I vote, but I advocate. I'm attempting to ventilate the dense stench of government policy.