GUEST BLOG: Dave Macpherson – Health Minister auditions for Nero role while mental health services collapse around him….
The call for an “urgent nationwide enquiry into mental health services” by Green Party Health spokesperson Kevin Hague comes 13 months after the death of our son, Nicky Stevens, while in the ‘care’ of Waikato DHB – and 20 years after the second Mason Report into NZ’s antiquated mental health services.
Hague’s call comes after growing community pressure for sweeping changes to the funding, management and strategies in this sector – and is the first time a senior politician representing a parliamentary party has made this call in recent years.
Andrew Little has backed Hague’s call, giving it further traction.
The calls come on the back of a high suicide death toll – at 569 last year, nearly double the annual road death toll, and over 25,000 calls to the police last year by or about people with serious mental health issues.
Not to mention a series of high profile deaths, dodgy psychiatrist appointments, ‘escapes’ from mental health institutions – some leading to serious crimes – and a growing number of damning reviews, reports and coroners’ findings about mental health services & facilities.
It had struck us as strange that at least the opposition parties hadn’t been falling over themselves to hammer the Government in an area that they have endless ammunition to work with – after all, Nicky wasn’t the first recent mental health patient to die under similar circumstances – but better late than never, I suppose.
Like Nero fiddling while Rome burnt, Health Minister Jonathan Coleman repeatedly brushes aside all calls for action – his mantra being that enough money is being put into mental health services, and nothing else is needed.
In 2012, the National Govt disbanded the Mental Health Commission set up following the Mason Report, and subsumed it within the powerless Health & Disability Commission, where a mid-level bureaucrat handles some enquiries – when we went to them, they asked us not to make a complaint about the DHB’s ‘treatment’ of our son, at least until we had seen what the Coroner, the Police and the DHB would come up with – and they acknowledged this could take years.
Many mental health service ‘consumers’ were (and are) left to fend for themselves out on the streets, or in substandard living situations, a clear cost-saving measure.
It will be controversial, but a growing number of people are saying to us that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, when standalone mental health facilities – like the (in)famous Tokanui in Waikato, Lake Alice or Cherry Farm in Otago – were closed.
At least then there was a dedicated group of mental health professionals, less answerable to the highly paid bean counters masquerading as ‘leaders’ of our public health services; though it has to be said that some of them bore a striking resemblance to Nurse Ratchett from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.
Nowdays, mental health facilities and services are very much a junior part of everyday public health operations, and a large chunk of cash designated for mental health gets consumed in every DHB’s considerable management overheads costs and (empire) building programmes. They are not ‘sexy’, and don’t get public ‘rescue helicopter’ campaigns set up for them. A few ‘names’ like Mike King and John Kirwan create a bit of a splash where they can, but really operate on the margins.
Despite obvious staffing needs, mental health facilities are forced to contribute to cuts in DHB staffing levels – in many cases down to or below safe levels; when our son was let out of Waikato DHB’s Henry Bennett Centre unsupervised, there was no regular staff nurse on duty, and an untrained ‘Psych Assistant’ opened the door for him, while the rest of the staff were at lunch!
Lip service is paid to the need to involve family, whanau and community in the support and treatment programmes for mental health patients – enough to fool gullible Govt officials sent in to periodically check on them, but not enough to ensure reality matches theory.
Our family has lost count of the number of terrible, tragic and downright disgusting cases that have been bought to our attention since Nicky died. We have literally been called at all hours to help get urgent support organised for people in crisis situations. When I get the opportunity, I give out Waikato DHB CEO’s personal email and phone number to families needing urgent help – I figure on a $600k pa salary, he’s paid to handle that!
Kevin Hague’s call is an important one, and should be strongly supported. A fresh, independent, well-resourced review won’t solve all the problems, but it will focus much-needed attention on this Cinderella sector.
Dave Macpherson
17 April 2016
That you for your blog and your radio and TV interviews. To lose a child like this is a terrible thing to have to live with. Your family tragedy is echoed in other places in this country. We simply do not have across the country enough mental health services. I have seen privately over the past 20 or so years a psychiatrist at a cost of $300 a time, I am in a privileged position of being able to afford this. The whole concept that mental health services can just be handled for those with long term depression by our GPs is a complete nonsense. Getting into the public system is pretty impossible unless one slits ones wrists!
Thank you for your on-going ‘speaking out’ on this issue.
I have seen a couple of people cut their wrists and still get no help.
So the National party mantra of “do more with less” in Health and Education isn’t working. Now we have Tolley and Bridges both outlining the fact, they will take money allocated for Health and Education and use it to support changes in CYF and the Northland bridge programs.
So there will be even less money going into essential services. Having already “saved” money by not filling vacant clinical positions in Mental Health as well as other health services across the country, when will Jonathan Coleman finally admit he is completely out of his depth.
$300 million over 7 years equates to just over $40 million. One of those years, the WDHB were told they needed to make savings of $20 million in mental health alone. So to making quotations of increased funding shows that Coleman has no answers and like a lot of National ministers, needs to resign.
Bert you raise a critical point about health being forced to hand over money ( (actually current staff)to resource the new CYFs model. Its already happening in Hamilton with Public Health Nurses and Plunket Nurses being directed to be Lead Professionals in the Childrens Teams, to work with complex child protection and family violence cases with no specialist training. Their core nursing work in prevention is now suffering. The review indicates very clearly that the next phase will be that DHBs will be directed to hand over resources from mental health ( child clinical psychologists, staff who work with trauma etc). Dave and his whanau raise an important point requesting a review, however as we speak the so called whole of government approach is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Anne Tolley uses emotive rhetoric to pull at our heart strings regarding the plight of vulnerable children, and yes it absolutely needs addressing but mental health once again ends up on the bottom of the heap.
Mental health units used to (probably still do) have secure outdoor areas for smoking. But you’re not allowed to use them. There has been a relentless drive, for years, by the anti-smoking lobby to stop smoking in these areas. They somehow think it is a good idea, when people are psychotic or suicidal, to pressure them to quit. Most of the staff don’t agree with that. Being ejected from the ward to a roadside 10mins walk away feels rejecting, contemptuous and scary. I’ve experienced it, I didn’t feel safe outside. Was smoking in the company of a woman who was battling a strong impulse to jump in front of a car, she didn’t do it, was presumably assessed as unlikely to do it. But it’s a completely unnecessary risk.