PSYCHIATRY - AND ITS DRAIN ON THE AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC PURSE

7/6/2014

PSYCHIATRY - AND THE UNWARRANTED EXTRA COSTS ON THE AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC PURSE

By Frances Harris

The Prime Minister of Australia, Mr Tony Abbot has been railing about the cost of maintaining unemployed people on the Disability Support Pension, and others on unemployment benefits, rising health care cost blowouts, and supplement benefits. There is a solution to decrease these expenditures.

There are huge amounts of wasted money which are hidden and rarely talked about. Just beneath the surface of budget deficits in health and welfare are untold stories which are not the fault of the recipients; in fact they are often the unwilling victims.

People with varying degrees of mental illness are being kept out of the work force and using up precious health care resources through no fault of their own, but because of bungled treatments and careless medical guesses by psychiatrists in Australia. When a person with a job is suddenly zonked out for weeks by the prescriptions of a psychiatrist, he or she is unlikely to hold that job for long. There are better ways.

The compounding stresses on both the patient, their family and support network can and does lead to the patient and family breakdown and all being hospitalized repeatedly due to compounding health and stress issues such as caring for the patient, money deficits, carer and family work interruption, that forces the patient on to the Disability Support Pension (DSP.) He or she may start out fit and healthy, but if the brain is compromised by the wrong medication, incomplete diagnostics or dose over a long time, there is nothing the family or patient can do. Follow up government clinics are overwhelmed. Inadequate treatments; and psychiatry’s inability to consider the cost and welfare of all concerned seems to be ignored. Expenditure from the public purse seems limitless.

There is a better way. Neurology should be in the forefront of mental health management, because it has the science to back it up. It’s like the old saying: ‘penny wise, pound foolish.’ If all mental patients were tested by way of pharmacoginetics which measures the individual’s capacity to absorb and tolerate specific medications, more of the mentally ill would be inclined to benefit from a prescription and less likely to finish up in psychiatric care. It costs about $270 for the full test, versus weeks in hospital, in the mental health ward and attendance at follow-up government clinics. Which is better? It’s obvious. If the type and dose of medication is right first time, there should be more people leaving the DSP and working, more carers back in employment, fewer carers looking for carer supplements from the government. Social security outlay and for hospital stays and ER presentations would shrink public outlays considerably. The Australian social fabric will be more secure.

Those who want to work, but suddenly become unable to maintain and existing job, are actually being held back. Now Psychiatry can’t be confused with medical care, because the two bear little resemblance. Medicine is holistic, psychiatry is not.

You may ask my qualifications for this evaluation of this subject: – well I am a carer and advocate for a person with a psychological disability whose life and potential career has been devastated by the actions of psychiatrists in both the public and private systems. He was a healthy, well-educated young man who wanted to continue his employment. He started with a small problem which, due to careless administration of medications over sixteen years has steadily kept him unemployable. A hasty diagnosis by a psychiatrist was made and doggedly held on to, even though there was substantial evidence it was be wrong. Now sixteen years later, we are getting closer to the truth.

Psychiatrists, by law are a highly protected, punitive, secretive, self-regulating breed, and because they have a captive patient base of patients, don’t seem to feel the need to follow due diligence shown by mainstream medicine, nor care. Sloppy practices can be glossed over by a confusion of symptoms and poorly defined diagnoses. Until this time, there has been very little science to prove them wrong.  But now, the cosy little relationship maintained with drug companies and Psychiatrists is being eroded by hard core science that threatens the validity of their postulations and ruminations. But they are pushing hard against it. Their huge power base is now under threat. The patient can now be scripted the best drug for them, rather than the current recommended drug of choice.

But - what about the unfortunate patients and wasted money? Well, to explain that; very powerful cliques of psychiatrists all-but run big public hospitals, especially those with significant psychiatric facilities. I have watched the opinion of a psychiatrist-in-training trump the highly skilled medical opinion of a registrar based on science, at Frankston Hospital, Victoria, Australia, and similar on more than one occasion. There is a considerable and ever growing psychiatric unit there.

On one of these there was ECG evidence of a dangerous heart arrhythmia in a patient who had experienced mental illness which could have been due to dangerous side effects of a psychotropic medication. On the instructions of a psychiatrist the patient was told to leave without any follow up. The patient was my son. A rush to another hospital identified the problem and arranged for follow up. When questioned, Frankston Hospital claimed it followed procedure. No matter what the treating doctor recommends, a psychiatrist has the final say for a patient on the mental health register. You can sense the doctors are privately distressed, but can’t comment. There have been deaths.

My son Edward has been kept on psychotropic drugs for sixteen years with little investigation to find out the cause of his problems. The psychiatrists called it schizophrenia, even though he did not meet the criteria. Once patients are given a diagnosis, they will be forced to be treated that way, sometimes for the rest of their life to do the psychiatrists bidding, even though the treatment may keep that person clamped in a life with serious side effects, psychological confusion, trauma, torment, and unemployment while tearing the patient’s family and support base apart. I call it ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ If you were to take a patient to three independent psychiatrists you would likely get three different diagnoses and treatments.

When Nazi Germany carried out such medical experiments on mental patients and the disabled, there were serious consequences. It is not only legal in Australia, but enforced by law. In Victoria a few repeat presentations at ER can result in a Community Treatment Order, where the patient is ‘zonked out,’ on injections with no say in the process. It’s terrifying, because if there are serious side effects, like coma or delirium, the injection keeps on giving for a fortnight. These patients are in serious peril. In my son’s case there is good evidence he has a sleep disorder which requires different treatment. Now with the advancement of science we are in the process of finding out.

Consideration of the welfare of the mentally ill and disabled are practically non-existent when it comes to psychiatry. There is no-one in authority there for then. There are shell procedures of appeal which are tilted. There have been many serious errors and people are now turning away from psychiatry and heading to neurology which has a specialist scientific base.

So as long as that protected species called the psychiatrist is allowed to run rampant with the public purse, under the protective cloak of vested interests, for example the current recommended drug of choice; incentivised hospital preferred drugs, things will never change. But I do ask Mr Abbot to not blame the victim, but take a closer look at what is going on right under his nose.