A year or so ago, I had an experience that many of you will struggle to comprehend.
For a decade, a mental health nurse with a fixation on my wife had stalked my family. My wife is a senior forensic psychologist, so you can imagine the kind of jealousies involved.
The obsession comprised the usual stuff: surveillance, sexual harassment, rumourmongering, etc. We fobbed it off for years.
However, after COVID, this mental health nurse went quietly bonkers, and her stalking escalated from being a pest to becoming an outright danger, expressed most frequently by her making false reports within the mental health system about my family.
Some of these were openly absurd and ignored. But she eventually got enough traction with another white-coated fruitcake to have me issued with an IAO (Involuntary Assessment Order).
This designation enables the white coats to come to your house and drag you to the nearest psych ward, whether you like it or not. Your rights are forfeit.
Consequently, after quite the struggle to bring me there, I spent half an hour or so in a psych ward, where I was falsely diagnosed as having…wait for it…folie à deux, a fictitious condition made famous by Batman and Arkham Asylum, over my very rational objections, including pointing out that they were using Batman, not the DSM5, as their reference.
It was a deeply unpleasant experience, I can assure you, especially because the actual psycho, the mental health nurse, was still working in the system. So I was confronted not only with being fraudulently diagnosed as the Joker and wondering if I was to be lobotomised for it, but also with the imminent prospect of her arriving to shoot me full of Drano.
I decided to leave in self-defence, politely informing the staff, when a psychiatrist began to shriek. Four vibrant security guards pounced upon me from all corners of the compass. I fought them off and ran from the hospital before leaping into some nearby bushes. Luckily, I hailed a passing taxi, took it to the airport, and flew to the first available place outside of VIC to avoid the insane pursuit: NSW.
By running, I immediately became a “missing person” in VIC and was hunted by all authorities. This is probably the only time in my life I was grateful for a horizontal fiscal mismatch because no state knows what the others are doing.
I was out of state for a week, but kept blogging and writing for News.com.au as a fugitive. Apparently, nobody in the asylum reads either.
After about a week, the police who had investigated the stalking case over the years noticed my face on a milk carton (so to speak) and sorted it all out; the lunatic mental health nurse was quietly disappeared, and I was declared unimpeachably sane, 30/30 on some or other measure, via a court. Several more courts are now involved in the litigation.
What I want to impress on readers today is that the places where we send our allegedly mentally ill are, themselves, a lot more mentally ill than the mentally ill, and when I read stories like the following, I am reminded of just how fucking crazy.
Victoria’s secure psychiatric units are increasingly resorting to the controversial use of drug detection dogs to combat the danger illegal drugs are posing to patients and staff in hospital wards.
The use of sniffer dogs inside closed wards has divided mental health experts, as hospitals try to balance the potential trauma and invasion of privacy for vulnerable patients against the risk posed by illicit drugs.
Have they run out of crocodiles to waddle between the padded cells to keep crazies in line? Can’t they turn out pockets or do a piss test these days? What’s the vicious canine going to tell them other than that the client is terrified of its malign growl? Or is its true purpose to run down the innocent and tear out his throat?
No, releasing the hounds will not improve psych wards, FFS.
P.S. This chapter is only the tip of the madberg of my trip through Victoria’s ruinous frontline services. I’ll update the rest of it as the courts enable me to.
