by Benjamin Merhav
The monopoly on mental health matters by the shrinks in Australia is both astounding and outrageous. It is completely out of control too, as the Sydney newspaper cutting below reports. In Victoria there is a Minister for Mental Health, but any complaint to her is automatically referred to the Chief Psychiatrist, thus making him completely unaccountable to anybody other than to his fellow shrinks. Even the Ombudsman refuses to deal with any complaint against the Chief Psychiatrist !
The Mental Health Act, 1986 here in victoria ostensibly provides "protection of people with mental illness in Victoria", but this "protection" is also under the control of the shrinks. Any "involuntary mental patient" can appeal to the Mental Health Review Board against any shrink's decision to issue a "Community Treatment Order" (the CTO actually stands for compulsory treatment order ) against him/her. However, if the shrink states that the patient "needs" treatment. to "prevent the patient's situation from getting worse" then such an appeal is dismissed by the panel. On each panel of the Mental Health Review Board there is a psychiatrist, and he is considered as the "expert" by the other two members.
Then there is an appeal avenue for the appealing patient, to appeal again to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, but it too would automatically approve the "treating psychiatrist decision", as he is regarded as the "expert". Then, as a last resort, and only in exceptionally arbitrary cases, there is an appeal to the Supreme Court, but it too would rely on the "expert" opinion of the "treating psychiatrist", and costs of such an appeal are extremely prohibitive. Besides, psychiatric wards for involuntary patients are no better than detention centres or prisons. Why are the shrinks allowed to attach their detention centres to hospitals ? A hospital is a place for therapeutic recuperation, not for psychiatric torture; a place for saving lives not for destruction of lives !
The press report below presumes that psychiatry is a "medical specialty", and that psychiatric "treatment" is a necessary "medical treatment", but this is hogwash, and it is admitted to be so by top shrinks ! (see, for example : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.
Here is the press report :
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/
Denial of rights in psychiatric treatment
August 18, 2011
"Not acceptable" ... the system of detainment for mentally ill patients is under attack. Photo: AFR
PSYCHIATRIC patients who have been detained involuntarily are being held without independent review for more than a month, and some hospitals are refusing access to lawyers and providing inadequate information to patients and their families.
The practices have been revealed in previously secret papers from a group set up to monitor the implementation of a decision by the Mental Health Review Tribunal to shift automatic reviews of patient detention from one week after it occurs to three weeks.
In just three meetings the group exposed a litany of problems in the treatment of involuntary patients - some of which have been made worse by the changes to the reviews.
The president of the tribunal, Greg James, said some hospitals refused to let doctors be questioned or did not properly notify patient carers of hearings.
He wrote to hospital medical superintendents after discovering patients had been held for more than five weeks without being presented to the tribunal, the papers show.
But Mr James defended the decision to delay hearings. He said that in the financial year to June 2010 there had been more than 10,600 inquires into involuntary treatment started but only 4828 were concluded, meaning most were adjourned and did not progress to a full hearing.
Figures provided to the monitoring group showed under the new system in the three months to the end of January 28.5 per cent of patients, 303 people, were seen by the tribunal three to four weeks after their detention. Nearly 3 per cent of patients were seen after their 28th day.
A lawyer who has worked in mental health but asked to remain anonymous told the Herald that hospitals were not properly informing patients of their right to appeal detention.
Whereas early hearings forced hospitals to provide information within a week, "quite often" now it was given weeks later, only a day or so before their hearing.
The papers show some hospitals have also been giving inadequate notice to family members and lawyers of tribunal hearings. One refused to allow Legal Aid lawyers to conduct advice clinics on some occasions.
The Greens MP and health spokesman, John Kaye, who requested the papers under parliamentary rules, said they exposed a systematic denial of patients' rights.
Patient appeals against detention had risen two-fold since the later reviews were instituted, he said.
Sascha Callaghan, a lawyer and researcher at the centre for values ethics and the law in medicine at the University of Sydney, said in areas such as the criminal justice system people were not held for long periods without review.
"From a rights perspective it's not acceptable," she said.
A clinical senior lecturer in the school of psychiatry at the University of NSW, Matthew Large, said patients could be detained on a little more than a couple of doctors' say-so.
"The restriction of freedom of movement is a very basic right that should not be removed … by non-judicial means," he said.
High numbers of adjournments could potentially cause problems, but in reality they were like full hearings which heard evidence from clinicians and assessed the case.
A psychiatrist and honorary associate at the University of Sydney, Christopher Ryan, said doctors were unlikely to detain patients for no reason but there should be protections in place.
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