I have heard you can drive people mad by locking them up in a tiny cell and depriving them of any meaningful activity while subjecting them to the constant stress of potential attacks - is that true?

I don’t want to dispute the thrust of Greg’s article – that specialist mental health services have been grossly and tragically under-resourced for decades. While there are some recent signs of hope, the fact is that far too many seriously unwell patients are prematurely discharged from hospitals with inadequate support and follow up – that is, if they are able to gain access to the service in the first place. Any GP could give you a filing cabinet full of horror stories. I have my reservations about People Power, but this is an issue which might well swing my vote to them.

Greg says: “A staggering 80 per cent of Victoria’s 4,000 prisoners have some form of mental illness, or will suffer a severe mental health episode during their time in incarceration. For women, the figure is even worse - with almost 85 per cent of women in prison suffering from mental illness.”

Particularly within the context of a discussion of psychiatric service provision, such statistics are meaningless without providing some definition of exactly what is being measured. If “mental illness” means what 80 to 85 per cent of prisoners are suffering from, then that is very different from the sorts of conditions that psychiatric services are – or should be – geared to serve. The people of real concern to forensic psychiatric services are a small proportion of that 80 to 85 per cent, and get lost in the political argy-bargy when such figures get bandied about. The remainder certainly may have significant needs: drug (including alcohol) services, intellectual disability services, social workers, psychological counseling, skills training, etc. For some, psychiatric input may be valuable to clarify diagnostic uncertainty and occasionally provide adjunctive treatment. But psychiatric services work on a medical model, using largely medical treatments that are inappropriate to the needs of most offenders.

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Such statistics as Greg has quoted can create the impression that the overwhelming majority of prisoners require specialist psychiatric services and the medical treatment they can offer. This is not the case. Service needs are much broader than that.
Undoubtedly psychiatric services need to be boosted both within and outside of prison walls. But this is only a small part of service need if we are to take the broadest view of mental health.

Snout,
"Normal" people, whatever that means can't understand depression and associated illness, unless they have themselves gone through the experience. I am unable to describe it even now haing had it for 8 years. I am free I couldn't imagine how it would feel for someone who has what I have to be confined to a cell. Sadly we with the illness are unable to produce anything, which may be why we are ignored.

I have also heard a judge pronounce, in a sentencing procedure, that anyone who commits a murder cannot be 'normal' in a psychiatric sense, in that normal people do not murder.

However the definition of mental illness is so broad in this context as to become almost meaningless.

Depression is a psychiatric illness. Being put in prison is enough to make anyone depressed. So if a person commits a crime, gets caught, convicted and gaoled, of course they are going to be depressed. They then may make greater use of illegal drugs, which creates yet another diagnosis. So is the solution to this not to imprison wrong doers in case they get depressed and use drugs?

Of course rehabilitation of prisoners should be more than just punishment, drug rehab and a few vocational courses. It has to include some form of psychiatric treatment.

But there is also a problem about touting the figures of 80% or whatever of prisoners having psychiatric conditions: The other way of looking at this is that if psychiatric patients are so prone to committing crime then perhaps the community needs to be protected from these people before a crime is actually committed?

Perhaps what we need is a half way situation, where someone who commits a crime, and is found to have an underlying condition, should be placed in a locked ward treatment situation with regular reviews, that way the community gets the protection that it wants, it sees a lag as being locked up, the beaks are seen as doing their job and the criminal (someone who commits a crime) gets treatment.

Hamlet,
I understand your point, however there are different types of murder that we are all capable of, affairs of the heart, premeditated murder, psycopathic murder etc. If a person finds their partner in the act in bed with someone else it may be a reaction to murder, whilst people like Ivan Milat deliberately set out to murder.

One person may be perfectly sane most of the time, with only that second of insanity, while the other is a psycopath, which is why I do not support the death penality, I would for mass murderers and peaodophiles if it were contained to those two catergories.