Mental health bureaucrats and ‘professionals’ in NZ have collectively followed the same path, and even those seeing the problems the community sees every day are slow to voice concerns, timid in their approach, and usually supremely arrogant in thinking only they have the ability to make any changes.
Twenty years ago the Clark Government shepherded through the closure of the country’s grim old standalone mental health institutions – Tokanui, Lake Alice and Cherry Farm are names that come to mind.
Two weeks ago a seriously mentally ill Otorohanga man killed his mother and two others, and badly injured his father – only days after his mother had requested help from Waikato DHB’s mental health services for fear of the harm her son might cause others (the request was obviously unsuccessful).
The truth is that mental health services, when they are available, are creaking at the seams even worse than the overall public health system. Staff numbers are insufficient and staff are poorly remunerated for the work they do, facilities are antiquated or were never adequate, community mental health services are underfunded and sparse or unavailable in many areas and support for vulnerable patients and their families is missing.
Dave Macpherson is The Daily Blog’s mental health blogger after losing his son to mental health incompetence. He is also a candidate for the Waikato DHB.
For ‘devolution’, the reader can insert ‘corporatisation’, or ‘’dismemberment’, or a host of other descriptions of the cuts to community and public health services that new right philosophies are delivering.
As the various lawyers and other legal types have jostled over the preliminaries ahead of the inquest into our son’s death while in the care of Waikato DHB 18 months ago, I’ve reflected on what a lucrative business mental health can be – for some.
During last week, Tai Tokerau MP Kelvin Davis was reported in both mainstream and social media as having had a text and phone ‘encounter’ with a severely depressed man who had harmed himself and was contacting Davis to say “goodbye”.
In perhaps a direct attack on my family, the Report states that “DHB leaders are worried about interest groups who repeatedly call for inspections and enquiries and allegedly run ‘personalised social media campaigns targeting individual clinicians, service leaders and staff’, according to mental health issues reporter Jess McAllen.
The father of Nicky Stevens, the young man who died in 2015 while in the care of Waikato DHB’s Henry…