Care of people with mental health issues.

Locally, it has been announced, there is to be a reduction in the number of beds allocated for mental health patients at one of the local public hospitals. There were letters to the editor in the local paper about this and a response from a representative of the District Health Board. There used to be big hospital complexes dedicated to this care, but these have been shut down in favour of care given in the community. I am not convinced the care in the community is adequate, though I also do not agree with the style of hospitals they used to have. I favour various sorts of supervised caring facilities within the community. I wrote a letter to the editor in response, though I doubt it will be published. Here is what I said.....

In Tuesday February 4th  "Letters to the Editor" Heather Casey of Southern DHB defends the reduction in beds at Wakari Hospital by saying "inpatient care is not the preferred option".  Cherry farm may not have been appropriate care. In patient care at Wakari may not be, but I know from experience that there are many mental health patients who are not coping under the present regime. I have run a Friday night drop-in centre for eighteen years. I am currently involved in the Dunedin Night Shelter Trust and I have other involvements with these people, many of whom I would class as my friends.  I could tell story after story of sad situations and circumstances of mental health patients in Dunedin. There are people struggling to feed themselves adequately. Lives that are sad existences, going from crisis to crisis. There are those who live in unhealthy dirty rooms, seemingly unable to do basic hygiene tasks. Sometimes the organisations funded to support them ban them if they misbehave, so they have even less community support. I am aware that many receive amazing support, but I am convinced there is a real need for many others to have care that is much more involved and controlled, so that their lives will be more healthy and fulfilling. On Saturday I appreciated the warm obituary your paper published about Pat Perkins. In my conversations with her, she shared an incredible list of often tragic costs and sad statistics, and passionately pleaded for higher levels of care. Her compelling argument was that in the long run, we as a community pay dearly when we avoid the cost of adequate care in the first place. In my experience, for a number of people in our community, we are a long way short of the care required.

It will be interesting to see if it is published. I have deep concerns for the people often at the bottom of the heap in our communities. We have no jobs for them in our super slick high tech economies, and that means their struggles are exacerbated by relative poverty, isolation and a sense of hopelessness. The late Pat Perkins was a local woman who out of hard experiences in her own life campaigned for adequate care. She often quoted cases where patients had harmed themselves or others, worked out the financial fall out from that, and raised the question, "Wouldn't it have been better to spend that money on adequate care in the first place? Much more cost and hurt could have been avoided." If compassion does not work, I think she reasoned, plain financial figures might bring change. "Do the maths!" she would say.

Having said that I do know there is a lot of care given, sometimes by very compassionate, dedicated people who go the extra mile. Many, though are falling between the cracks and struggle "out there".