Whilst I commend and admire Victoria’s ex-Premiere Jeff Kennett for his involvement in BeyondBlue (a truly worthwhile organisation that deals with that silent but all too real plague of our times – Depression), I cannot put out of my mind the fact that he was instrumental in weakening the health services of this state during his reign.

Each day I spend in Melbourne I am reminded that the mental health services in this state have still not recovered from those times. There is a multitude of people living on the streets and in commission housing receiving nothing but a Salvation Army or Wesley Mission visit when their stretched and independently funded resources can manage it.

Unfortunately I have had first and second-hand experiences with people who have been let down by the fact that there are too few beds in mental health wards. There was one man in particular, in the early 2000s, who had to be escorted by police to a clinic to be administered his medication. Not only a waste of the cops’ time, but they weren’t trained for such duties, and their ranks were thinned by the same government that caused the mental health crisis in the first place. The man in question was the father of a close friend. He could barely care for himself, and had had a number of violent episodes, one of which may or may not have led to a death. He lost his kids to the state, was put in a commission flat in the west and basically rotted away. He died in hospital alienated from a family who argued over who would pay for the funeral.

Just lately, I have come across another man. He was left with his elderly father in the nineties when he should have been institutionalised. Of course, his father died. With no other family, this tormented middle aged man is fending for himself. He lives in a flat in an inner suburb of
Melbourne and terrorises his neighbours with threats, screaming, yelling and bashing at all hours and for no reason. The body corporate has no power to do anything as he owns his flat (left him by his father), the police have been called, but he doesn’t let them in to his heavily fortified flat, and the council are “investigating” his case through their mental health services.

The only way to get good mental health services in this state is to try committing suicide, although you’ll only be locked up and watched for a few days for that, or commit a crime so heinous that a court can be convinced that nobody in their right mind could do such a thing, and you’ll be placed in a high security forensic unit. There’s little in between.