When is Amnesty International going to get off its arse and campaign for the rights of mental health prisoners in WA?
-by Graham Milner
The text below was appended to an article published late last year on the old Perth Indymedia general newswire. This article presented a summary of a visiting Amnesty International leadership delegation's report on government neglect in remote Aboriginal communities in Australia. Shortly after the publication by Perth Indymedia of the AI report, and a couple of weeks before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting began in Perth, Perth Indymedia was shut down by the collective that ran it. Some recent material that was then online in the Perth site archive was transferred to the national Indymedia site in Sydney, but the bulk of the Perth site's archives, in spite of promises from the supremos running the site that these archives would be preserved and would soon be made available online, was apparently lost. Amongst those items that did make it onto the Sydney-based Indymedia site was the AI report I have mentioned. However, my addendum was not included. The item I had posted about human rights and mental health in WA had been included as an addendum to the AI report published on Perth Indymedia, but the addendum was apparently cut from the AI article as published by Indymedia in Sydney. I queried on the Sydney-based Indymedia site the absence of my addendum, but received no comment or other response from the web-masters of that site.
I understand that a new Mental Health bill has either gone through, or is in the process of going through, State Parliament in WA. I have yet to closely study the new WA mental health legislation, or proposed legislation. The remarks below about the WA Mental Health Act refer to the legislation that was on the books when my article was written.
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I'm pleased to see that both the international and the local leaderships of Amnesty International are so concerned about defending the rights of Aboriginal people in Australia. Very good.
How about the worthies of AI expressing similar concern about the rights of those who fall foul of the psychiatric health system in this country (in Western Australia for example). Over the last thirty five years or so I personally have been detained in WA and other Australian psychiatric institutions on something like forty occasions. Practically all these admissions to State mental hospitals in WA or elsewhere were involuntary: in many cases in WA in particular I was simply picked up by the cops or the 'heroic whiteshirts' (ie. Mental Health thugs) and deposited by them in the central State psychiatric institution at Graylands. On some of those occasions I was kept against my will in that institution for several months at a time.
At Graylands Hospital I was, on more occasions than I care to remember, repeatedly abused and humiliated by various members of the staff. While detained in the locked wards at Graylands, a pattern that was repeated during most of these admissions, I was several times stripped naked and locked overnight in the so-called 'single rooms' (cells) in the security complexes. These cells have bare, lino/concrete floors and no ablutions or drinking water. One can say that things have really reached the pits when one has to attempt to drink one's own urine from a bare cell floor.
Once, shortly after I was released from one of my many incarcerations at Graylands Hospital, I approached Amnesty International in Perth with a view to urging them to take up the issue of the gross abuses of human rights that have occurred, and no doubt continue to occur, in State psychiatric institutions in WA. I was informed by the local AI representatives that Amnesty in Australia does not involve itself in any human rights issue within this country, and that this policy is the same for AI in every country in the world.
Well then, citizens, notwithstanding that stated policy, you do seem voluble enough about the rights and interests of Indigenous Australians, which is of course a highly creditable thing. So when are you going to get off your backsides and say something about the gross human rights abuses that regularly occur in public psychiatric institutions in WA, ands elsewhere in Australia?
As you should be aware, the practice of detention without trial is a violation of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights. Under the present incarnation of the WA Mental Health Act, as I understand it, there is no provision for a legal appeal beyond Graylands Hospital for anyone who wishes to challenge in the courts an involuntary detention at that institution.
Believe it or not citizens, under the provisions of the WA Mental Health Act, for those people unfortunate enough to be held against their will at the Graylands 'funny farm', the buck stops as far as the right of appeal goes, with the hospital's Chief Psychiatrist (or perhaps this person should be more appropriately referred to, after a famous sequence in Dostoevsky's novel 'The Brothers Karamazov', as the 'Grand Inquisitor').