Mental health system is in dire straits
Locking someone up for 23 hours a day can only make their mental illness worse.
If John Key visited a country that locked its most vulnerable citizens away because they were too difficult to deal with, he’d be expected to raise it as a human rights issue.
It’s happening here, and almost nothing is being done about it.
New Zealand’s mental health services are in a mess. People have died and a culture of blame-shifting appears to be the default setting for district health boards.
Waikato DHB is yet to begin investigating the suspected suicide of 21-year-old Nicky Stevens, more than a year after his body was discovered in the Waikato River.
Stevens, who suffered from schizophrenia, was under a compulsory care order in Hamilton when he failed to return from an unsupervised 15-minute smoke break on March 9, 2015.
The police are investigating and an inquiry into the facility by mental health boss John Crawshaw resulted in the replacement of the centre after the buildings were deemed unsafe.
Meanwhile, the DHB has refrained from investigating its own practises because it’s claimed it might jeopardise the police investigation.
I’d submit, if everyone is telling the truth to authorities then it needn’t.
Some coordination may be required as to the release of the findings, but the quality of any DHB investigation has undoubtedly been compromised by the length of time that has passed and the ability of staff to remember with enough accuracy, the finer details.
Unless of course, police find an individual or certain individuals are at fault.
A cynic might argue it would be tempting for the DHB at that point, to say the most robust systems in the world could not account for personal failings.
MidCentral DHB has undergone some reform after the apparent suicides of two patients in as many months in 2014.
At Capital and Coast, the plight of 38-year-old autistic man Ashley Peacock - held in a tiny isolation unit for five years - has drawn outrage.
Crawshaw has said that nationally, seclusion hours are declining.
But sources say the rate of ‘‘night exclusion’’ hours, and the hours vulnerable patients spend in an isolation room with the door unlocked - threatened to behave or it will be - tell a different story. That’s not rehabilitative. It’s punitive, and it’s holding someone’s mental illness against them as a means of control.
Perhaps it’s time for a CYF-style inquiry into the way New Zealand looks after its mental health patients.