David Macpherson is TDB’s mental health blogger. He became involved in mental health rights after the mental health system allowed his son to die. He is now a Waikato DHB Member-elect.
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.
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”.
The father of Nicky Stevens, the young man who died in 2015 while in the care of Waikato DHB’s Henry…
The parents of a former Waikato DHB mental health patient are “very upset, but not surprised” about today’s Hamilton Police…
National’s political radar has been noticeably out of synch in a number of high profile areas recently (what Housing Crisis?; what Tax Haven?), and another that is more stealthily creeping up on them is the growing damage that well-publicised calamities in the mental health sector are causing to their well-cultivated image of being on top of health issues.
Dear Bob – we have noted from your reply that you have not yet been able to bring yourselves to say ‘sorry’.