SMH Letters, 22 September, 2009

Kevin Rudd urges action on depression and for it to be “brought in from the cold”, yet sufferers of severe mental illness who commit petty crimes while very sick are punished with imprisonment (”No more suffering in silence as Rudd urges action on depression”, September 21).

Why do we punish the mentally ill? Would we imagine saying to a cancer sufferer that jail will be their treatment program? We have dehospitalised mental health care as if mental illness were illegitimate. Little wonder the stigma of mental illness remains.

Mary Lou Carter Drummoyne

SMH September 11, 2009

THE Senate will conduct an inquiry into suicide in Australia, following revelations in the Herald that the country’s suicide prevention strategy was failing and the death toll over the last decade had been underestimated by as much as 30 per cent in some states.

The community affairs references committee would investigate the accuracy of suicide statistics, the effectiveness of the national prevention strategy, and the personal, social and financial costs of suicide, said the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Rachel Siewert.

The adequacy of the emergency service response to suicide and attempted suicides would also be examined, she said.

Lifeline welcomed the Senate inquiry, which mental health experts have long been championing. Its chief executive officer, Dawn O’Neil, said much more could be done to prevent suicide.

“We know that, tragically, up to seven people are taking their own lives each day in Australia,” she said. ”For people aged 15 to 34, it is the No. 1 cause of death in this country.”

For the past decade, state and federal governments have boasted that the incidence of suicide had fallen from a peak of 2700 in 1997 to about 1800. Yet figures obtained by the Herald indicate the toll is as high as, if not higher than, it was in the 1990s, at 2700 to 3000 deaths a year.

John Mendoza, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Sydney’s faculty of medicine, said quantifying the real personal and social cost of suicide had never been done.

”We know the death rate and the number of people hospitalised from self-harm is very significant,” he said. ”Tens of thousands of Australians each year are hospitalised due to self-harm, and it is an issue that for too long has been kept in the dark.”

RUTH POLLARD, SMH September 11, 2009

Last week saw some attention focused back on Mental Health and several letters were publish in the SMH. These are reproduced below for those who might not have seen them.

Is it any wonder people are sick when system is too?

Ruth Pollard’s revelation of suicide rates being grossly underreported does not surprise me (”Revealed: Australia’s suicide epidemic”, August 21).

A staggering 25,000 of our fellow citizens have been lost to suicide in the past 10 years. Many thousands of them, mentally ill and unable to get medical care, have self-medicated at the end of a rope or under a train with all the trauma and heartache dragged in that terrible wake.

How can they be said to have ”fallen through the cracks” when the cracks are wide enough to swallow a prime-mover?

Although our population has doubled, the number of mental health-care beds have been slashed. Nationally, in the past 10 years alone, thousands of mental-health-care beds have been closed, most recently Rozelle Psychiatric Hospital in the magnificent Callan Park. These closures have precipitated suicide as an inevitability, not an unforeseen happenstance.

These deaths can be laid fairly and squarely at the feet of flawed policy and the politicians who blindly promote it.

I’ve been to the new state-of-the-art mental health facility at Concord. If ‘’state-of-the-art” means the chaos of bedlam, then we have succeeded in putting mental health care back 100 years. I saw mentally ill people pacing the perimeter of the small grassed area at the facility like caged animals.

It is a profound and sad disgrace and an indictment of those who have imposed a sick system on very sick people who deserve better.

Lina Aggett Croydon

Patients’ progress

Even at 82 I am not old enough to have been a patient in the original Callan Park and I suspect Peter Grien (Letters, August 26) has no experience of that hospital either.

But I was a patient in Rozelle Hospital 10 years ago. Yes, I slept in a dormitory and was on regular medication (not Largactil), but I remember no thumpings or smell of urine, only regular barbecues and walks in the park.

Max Sollitt Annandale

Peter Grien says the closure of the big institutions was ”a great step forward in mental health care”. I’m not sure moving patients out of Callan Park or Gladesville and into prisons and homeless shelters can rightly be thought of as progress.

Dave Robinson Gladesville