Royal commission into Vic Mental Health.

[stui magpie]

When I started working in public health in 2008, Victoria actually WAS the gold standard for Mental Health in the country. WTF happened?

[Tannin]

Kennet, yes. Morrison no, though he has done nothing to fix it.

There was a laughable headline in today's paper: "Mental health system in Victoria fails to live up to expectations". What a pisser of a joke that was. It has not failed in the slightest. It has fulfilled and indeed exceeded the worst expectations of any observer with a clue.

Essentially, state governments looked at the old institutional system and ripped the guts out of it, without bothering to replace it with anything else that actually worked. The rhetoric was "community care" and "integration" but the driving motivation was relentless cost cutting. I don't remember now whether that was yet another of Kennet's disastrous decisions or whether it goes back further than that. The bottom like is that you can't complain about the Victorian mental health system because there is no system.

No state government has had the balls to even try to fix it.

[stui magpie]

When I started in Public Health I spent a lot of time talking to the senior Mental Health people there. They explained how the de-institutionalising that Kennett had done was best practice. They closed the asylums like Mont Park and replaced that with a community approach.

People who liked the mentally ill "out of sight, out of mind" liked the Asylums and didn't like the new approach.

I saw first hand how the psych inpatient units operated and what the philosophy and intent was behind it and sat in disciplinary interviews with people who struggled to adapt from the old days of lock em up and hose em down.

Shit, I went through a brand new High Dependency unit that had been destroyed by some mad bastard using his elbows, fists and fingernails and stood in the nurses station watching as one of the most dangerous patients in the state was gently but firmly marched to HDU after breaking a nurses jaw because she was black.

Victorian Mental Health practitioners were being invited to interstate conferences to spread the word and give guidance how to do things. Some of the initiatives at Maroondah Inpatient units weren't just leading edge in Australia but world.

12-13 years later the whole system has turned to shit apparently. The philosophy was great, what happened to the implementation.

[Tannin]

The philosophy was exactly equivalent to the new philosophies that swept through the teaching community at around the same time or a bit earlier, and exactly equivalent to the "new" philosophy that swept through economics ar about the same time.

They all failed. Miserably.

And there is a reason for that. It is the same reason for all of them. It is the same reason which explains why they were so successful in becoming the fashionable philosophy favoured by bureaucrats and politicians. In a nutshell, all three "new" philosophies were grand excuses for not doing the work.

[watt price tully]

[5 from the wing on debut]

Your wife worked for 60 years?
Are you her fit cyclist toy boy?

[watt price tully]

[stui magpie]

As expected, blame Kennet.

10 years of Bracks and Brumby labor governments didn't think to do anything about the ID funding or do work on the system?

And of course lets blame commonwealth funding. Dan can afford to spend $ billions on tunnels, trenches and railway bypasses, and another $1B+ on a road he didn't build but ask him to tip some into mental health and it's nahhhhhh.

He gets credit only for calling the royal commission into a system that he had allowed to degenerate to that level under his watch.

And @Tannin, de-institutionalising Mental Health wasn't a do nothing wrong philosophy. Regardless of motive what it started was to treat mentally ill people with dignity and respect as every human deserves rather than lock them up involuntarily in asylums where they were routinely abused