"Use of Care Opinion by health service representative"

In February my story about a terrifying experience of misdiagnosis and illegitimate use of the Mental Health Act by WA Country Health Service (WACHS) followed up by systems abuse and poor accountability was posted on this website (you can read this: here). A response from a senior staff member for the South West was immediately also published (they had been notified of my story before publication as per Care Opinion’s practice). In my opinion, WACHS’ response sounded almost exactly the same as many other official responses on this site but nonetheless I took it as genuine and constructive. In this response a senior staff member invited me to contact their office which I immediately did - agreeing to travel more than an hour to meet with them a few days later.

At the conclusion of this meeting, I was told that WACHS could not respond there and then (which was of course understandable) but that they would look into my case and get back to me as soon as possible. I followed up by forwarding a few relevant documents such as a detailed letter from my GP. A week or so later I called to enquire about progress. I got no response. The following week I called again and emailed. Eventually I got an email from their colleague saying there was no progress to report and it would take another couple of weeks. I heard nothing for six weeks - not even a “sit tight we’re still working on it” update nor any acknowledgement of further emails and calls from me. Eventually a letter arrived from the senior staff member saying merely that because my case was being reviewed for invalidation by the Mental Health Tribunal it was not appropriate for them to respond; something which I feel they could have said at the outset.

The senior staff member (and the consumer feedback coordinator I also met with) seemed sincere at the time. I still wanted to believe they were acting genuinely but given my previous experience with many WACHS staff and the senior staff member’s complete “radio silence” towards me over the past several weeks, I started to worry that it would now be foolish of me to take this on faith.  Then I learnt that the senior staff member had, even before their perfunctory response to me, personally provided a “medical report” to the Mental Health Tribunal.  Disappointingly, I feel this report is far from objective or accurate. I believe it omits many crucial and undisputed facts and is very seriously skewed towards merely justifying WACHS actions. It does not address any of the diagnostic or real issues in question and is obviously carefully curated; written as a defensive legal posture, not as the independent medical review it is purported to be.

For more than two years now I have been communicating with WACHS in an explicitly non-adversarial manner attempting to address this issue so the fact that, even now after saying what they did on Care Opinion and meeting with me, this senior WACHS clinician seems to me to be more concerned with protecting their colleagues from criticism than protecting me from the negative consequences of their mistaken assumptions and resultant misdiagnosis (their colleagues are protected from litigation under the legislation anyway).

I do not offer this new post to Care Opinion in any retaliatory sense but out of genuine concern that my experience suggests that many of the “We are sorry you had that experience … please get in touch with us” responses from health care services published here on Care Opinion may be a lot less sincere than they sound. They may in fact too often be worryingly formulaic and standardised signs of a PR department in overdrive, driven more by the urge to “manage” negative consumers experiences than by any genuine motivation to both address and actually learn from them. All public health services operate under the Australian Open Disclosure Framework. A nice-sounding response published on Care Opinion is not complying with Open Disclosure if it is just well worded window dressing to take any public sting out of someone’s story.

My case involved WACHS psychiatrists disbelieving my disclosures of family violence despite overwhelming verifiable evidence. This led to serious misdiagnosis and repeated egregious failures under the Mental Health Act and many other required standards. Research in Australia and overseas has shown for years that women who have experienced family violence like me are all too often disbelieved, discredited, misdiagnosed, badly treated and then ignored by mental health services, leaving them and their children even more traumatised and vulnerable than they were before “treatment”. Research has also been reporting for decades that manipulating mental health services and weaponizing any diagnoses are common legal and psychological tactics for many abusers, especially in coercive control situations like mine. I have raised these concerns with WACHS repeatedly for over two years with no acknowledgement.

Coercive control is strongly associated with psychiatric harm and risk of suicide, as is involuntary psychiatric treatment. If services like WACHS keep refusing to even admit what went wrong in a situation like mine, never mind do anything to change things, then I believe more lives will be ruined and inevitably lost.