System 'fails' mentally ill

**Fi_** · 3rd August 2007

System 'fails' mentally ill

Article from:

COLIN JAMES, LEGAL AFFAIRS EDITOR
August 03, 2007 02:15am

THE Adelaide Remand Centre has become the biggest mental health hospital in South Australia, an inquest has heard.

Expert forensic psychiatrist Dr Craig Raeside has told State Coroner Mark Johns that community-based mental health services were failing to keep people out of the criminal justice system.

"What we are seeing is a transfer of mentally ill people from hospitals into the correctional system but we are not seeing any increase in the services being provided," he said. "To put it bluntly, there are more seriously mentally ill people in custody than there are in psychiatric hospitals in this state.

"The remand centre is probably the biggest psychiatric hospital in the state."

Dr Raeside, who has treated inmates at the remand centre for more than 15 years, said it did not have enough mental health services to meet demand "and it is getting worse".

In a damning assessment of the state's mental health system, Dr Raeside also said:

SERIOUSLY mentally ill prisoners could not be admitted to the high-security mental health unit, James Nash House, because of critical bed shortages.

A STATE Government plan to replace James Nash House with a new forensic psychiatric facility at Mobilong was "inadequate" and "short-sighted".

COMMUNITY-BASED treatment programs were failing mentally ill people, with many ending up in the criminal justice system.

THERE was a critical shortage of psychologists within prisons to treat sentenced inmates for behavioural issues.

Mr Johns is investigating how a mentally ill man accused of child sex offences committed suicide at Yatala Labour Prison in January last year by hanging himself.

Psychiatrists warned prison managers that Arthur Charles Smith was a high suicide risk before he was transferred from the Adelaide Remand Centre to Yatala following threats from other prisoners.

Dr Raeside, who treated Mr Smith at the Adelaide Remand Centre, said he should have been sent to James Nash House where expert medical help would have been available.

"One of the big concerns is that it is extremely difficult to move anyone from the remand centre or Yatala into James Nash House because of the limited beds it has for prisoners," he said.

"We can't get them in because beds aren't there and it just doesn't happen."

The inquest continues.

I remember seeing on TV once a story about an American jail that had such a large proportion of inmates with mental health issue that they had to basically gear themselves up to in fact be a mental heath hospital as well as a prison. From what I remember there were Judges that sentenced people to that jail so they could get the mental health care that they needed.