Concerns about understaffing at a mental health service that treated a 37-year-old man accused of killing a mother-of-four in Christchurch were escalated to the Minister of Health Andrew Little, the Herald has learned.
In a briefing on January 20, officials at the Ministry of Health told the minister that the workforce at the Canterbury regional forensic mental health service was so stretched that its secure psychiatric facility at Hillmorton Hospital was operating only 12 of its 15 beds and “running a waitlist for acutely unwell patients”.
The Herald understands that the man accused of killing Laisa Waka Tunidau, 52, in what police have described as a “random attack” in the suburb of Sockburn on Saturday was treated in the Hillmorton forensic facility.
There have been a spate of knife attacks on random members of the public by people with clear mental health issues and whom have been failed by out collapsing mental health system.
None of this can be a surprise right?
Every inch of the State is exhausted.
Every person trapped in the terrible bureaucracy and unfunded hell hole of any Government service are all ticking time bombs.
I’m guessing that now the violence of these sick and damaged people is starting to explode against random members of the public rather than their normal self harm pattern, ‘something must be done’.
That’s so Kiwi ain’t it?
Once the enormous problem we have been avoiding gets so huge that it starts killing others, then we look at ‘something must be done’.
Until we find a new means to tax the 1% and their financial elites, our mental health system will always be the underfunded bastard child of public health budgets.
As the stresses of the looming economic recession became even tighter, it will play out on the street with the failed vomiting their misdirected hate on anyone within knife swinging distance.
This is the era of endless entropy at a time of declining empathy.
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If you want more money for the state, you could tax the one very large and consistently (25+ years) profitable sector: residential housing. Not just landlords’ rental, ordinary family homes. It has been the biggest wealth generator by far.
Problems with increasing income taxes are several: income is easy to hide for top income earners, those talented income earners can move to another country, and there simply are not that many of them so it is a small tax base.
WFF means that a lot of wage and salary earners pay no overall tax, except G ST. The wages are taxed but the welfare payment makes up for it.
and what would you say to those that don’t get any of these welfare payments?
Tax the family home? that is so Gareth Morgan of you, who btw, is on record, together with his son to not paying taxes despite being filthy rich.
yeap, see what i said about the very high income people avoiding income taxes. in contrast, taxing the capital gain on family homes is hard to avoid.
As to those without WFF or anything else, those wage and salary earners get a progressive income tax rate.
dude i am a child less person not a filthy rich person. so you would want to tax my home that costs less then a rich peoples shitter cause you find it to hard to tax the rich?
And Please define progressive as neither L nor N are in any way progressive.
And no opening female changing rooms to men is not progressive. And neither is throwing away unhoused people in motels to be forgotten.
A ‘progressive income tax’ is one that increases the rate of tax as the income increases. Every democracy has that feature of its income tax system.
The rich person’s shitter would pay a higher tax than your house if it had gained more value than your house.
It would “surprise” the CEOs of the Health Boards, it would “surprise” Andrew Little…they do not live in those communities, where people who are deeply unwell are being released into…they can afford to be “surprised”
While there have been problems in mental health institutions in the past, deinstitutionalization, as was always championed by the nastiest neoliberals (like Ronald Reagan) around, was never the solution.
The late Enoch Powell warned of ‘rivers of blood’ over Afro-Caribbean immigration to Britain. Given he invented deinstitutionalization, he perhaps should instead have written caveats about the ‘rivers of blood’ it would unleash into his bill to destroy the UK’s mental health system.
in all fairness deinstitutionalisation’ was also pushed by lots of hip trendy ‘forward thinking’ psychiatrists and psychologists back in the day..
and everybody ignored the fact ‘care in the community’ would need massive funding which it never got…
the ‘hip’ and the greedy are equally guilty on this one.
It goes around in circles Martyn.
In order to have nice things that wealthy countries have, we need to do two things:
1. Run the place efficiently. Not the bureaucratic shambles we see in action today.
2. We need more rich, successful people to live here and remove the obstacles that prevent them from doing their thing. They bring jobs and tax revenue. Drop the tall poppy hating of success because it is self destructive.
Until we get our act together we will continue to see our health system crumble, our schools churn out illiterates and our goat track roads kill people.
By run the place efficiently you mean how they didn’t from 2008, that we can agree upon. To return to that government would result in record suicides just as it did back then.
What a copout you are Andrew. To keep stating old wornout sermons to the devoted to wealth and class and bewailing that we can’t reach their heaven because of a faulty system.
Obviously repairing the system will solve the problems. is the eternally prescribed medicine. In actual fact the ordinary life of all the wealthy or reasonably comfortable people is an example of how people can live in a dysfunctional state in both meanings, and are mentally unwell from obsessions and outbreaks of narcissism and paranoia and see that as normal. Actually it is widespread paranoia, which gets harder to ignore, but the practised manage to do so by erecting fences to screen them from incursions of reality.
the hyper rich contribute nothing to the nation andrew they don’t even pay their due in tax.
“1. Run the place efficiently”.
You mean run the government on a business model and cut costs until it’s efficient – like we have just done for 30 years. If you don’t want a bureaucratic shamble you spend the money and employ workers in their field not legions of management and accountants.
“2. We need more rich, successful people to live here
When you don’t have the National Party importing a million desperate ‘work at any low wage’ third world immigrants and instead train the people already here and pay them higher wages you in fact have more rich successful kiwis.
“and remove the obstacles that prevent them from doing their thing”.
Please check out the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” data for Labour run New Zealand. https://bit.ly/World-Bank-Ease-Of-Doing-Business
Look we have people at large in our communities who are mentally unwell. Based on recent murders committed by people with a mental illness. Obviously some should not be at large in our communities. And if they are not fit to stand trial they are not fit to be released. And why aren’t they being monitored and who is ensuring they are taking their medications, this is why they need to be monitored or alternatively they will have to be in residence. Having had many dealing with mental health they are trying to do their bests and mental health issues are on the rise.
Look we have people at large in our communities who are mentally unwell. Based on recent murders committed by people with a mental illness. Obviously some should not be at large in our communities. And if they are not fit to stand trial they are not fit to be released. And why aren’t they being monitored and who is ensuring they are taking their medications, this is why they need to be monitored or alternatively they will have to be in residence. Having had many dealing with mental health they are trying to do their bests and mental health issues are on the rise.
Well things are going to soon be more underfunded with Jacinda trashing our FTA with China, lol
Feels like society as a whole is skating on some very thin ice right now
Fortunately our Police come with a semi-automatic mental health treatment solution, which fixes the problem permanently when other branches of the State have failed people & dumped them, unsupported in communities. A sad state of affairs & way too common these days.
I am not surprised but very saddened. Stress and under staffing will lead to mistakes. This mistake is catastrophic
We often hear that there are huge stigmas around mental health. One of the primary reasons for this is the utter mismanagement of seriously unwell people in care. The thousands of New Zealanders who face mental illness are the unseen victims of this patient mismanagement as they are viewed with suspicion and fear.
Very few sufferers ever commit serious crime, but all are labelled by the actions of a few. Allowing dangerous people to have unsupervised leave carries a consequence for all people unlucky enough to suffer significant distress. But once again, our voices and interests are ignored.
Thanks for mentioning this Martyn. I don’t think the problem is a lack of ‘mental health’ money. The problem is the priority given to spending the existing money.
These individuals are likely to suffer from severe psychiatric illnesses that would do better with psychiatric treatment and legally compulsory followup. This government does not want to prioritize that sort of care. Millions are being spent on ‘mental health’ – not on psychiatric services. Do-Little fantasizes that counselling etc will stop people developing severe psychotic illnesses – good luck with that. There will sadly be more of these outcomes.
A related problem is the ‘abuse in state care’ of prisoners being left untreated and psychotic in cells due to a lack of hospital beds. This has gone on for years. As well as being cruel, leaving people with prolonged untreated psychosis makes them harder to successfully treat when they come out of prison or into hospital services, and more likely to lead to these kind of outcomes.
How is it even possible to piss 1.9 billion dollars extra mental health funding up against the wall and still make things worse?
Seems like the right time to waste billions then on merging RNZ and TVNS plus restructure the health system
” Once the enormous problem we have been avoiding gets so huge that it starts killing others, then we look at ‘something must be done’.
Indeed something …anything like a review which as we all know is about perception and giving the impression something…anything must be done and quickly forgotten about once the news cycle has moved on.
Adern , Robertson and Little have been governing for five years and promising to fix the shambles they inherited after nine long years of austerity and while promising two billion for mental health even Mike King
gave his medal back at his disgust on how this LINO government was all about the big picture to win elections but when the rubber hits the road they fail because the neo liberal economy will not allow any kind of serious investment in health or anything else that does not return a profit like addressing the carnage and appalling drivers on our dangerous road network.
Kiwi’s and their children are expendable in every aspect of this economy and only your wealth should you have it will protect you from the worst ravage’s of the free market.
I work in mental health and see the the levels of impoverishment , despair , fear , misery , and destruction of this economy which reaches every facet of life at this level.
I look after people who are so marginalised that their income barely lasts two days after the money gets paid in and many are seriously unwell with medical conditions that are not their fault. It is schizophrenia and serious anxiety to name just two and many are living in old rotting former council flats here in Christchurch away from the keeping up Joneses and the exceptionally well off who snare and look at these people when I am with them in public like they are leper’s or something you scrape off your shoe.
Maori or Pakeha these people are the forgotten human beings thrown away like the rubbish that litters our roads and highways but apparently we are 100% clean and green.
There will be more casualties like this poor lady and there will still be nothing done.
hanks Mosa your words state the situation as we see it reported and if you are in the midst and also report it that confirm news items as correct and immensely troubling because so little is being done to treat the situation. Guard the helpless and hopeless to keep them an us safe, and the helpless amenable to helpful treatment with loving care, done effectively and with ongoing support as they handle their lives, and of course the basecourse, right assistance to build resilient people from the beginning with kind and stable treatment of children and their vulnerable parents. A caring country wouldn’t get these problems, we are reaping what we have sown. We all are at fault to some extent so how can we turn this around now as our neolib system sinks back to conditions that arose in the past centuries under the same zeitgeist. Don’t we learn and carry those learnings forward, realisingthat once known they will apply for ever, with some touching at the edges?
Much appreciated Greywarbler.
In Nelson Mail this morning. Grandmother in Housing First home overseen by Salvation Army, Te Piki Oranga and Male Room services. took in her grandchildren two of whom have been removed under order of security guards.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/128910278/security-escort-children-from-motel-grandmother-evicted
(Interesting, a banner for funding Stuff is headed with “Sheeple-free zone”)
Read below the warm-sounding blurb about these agencies supposed to be helping needy people in a caring and effective way. Hah!
https://www.ght.co.nz/about-us
Our Team Gallery – Gateway Housing Trust
https://www.ght.co.nz › our-team-gallery
Jaap Noteboom – General Manager. Jaap began his working life as an engineer, before developing a passion for social work and making a positive difference in … (See if you can read the small print about this person and other Gateway employees before the screen changes and sweeps them away. Very fleeting info not even same as the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.)
This is a listing on google. The man who is a team leader for the Salvation Army is part of an industry according to this. Could be appropriately put I think:
Jaap Noteboom’s Email & Phone – Ministry of Social Development …
https://contactout.com › Jaap-Noteboom-60386369
What industry does Jaap Noteboom work in? Jaap Noteboom works in the Health, Wellness and Fitness industry. Who are Jaap Noteboom’s colleagues?