As we think best thoughts for dear Helen Haines, my thoughts go back to this… ▪️The ‘Inquiry into Health Services for the Psychiatrically Ill and Developmentally Disabled’ was the 1983 Richmond Report. ▪️It led to closure of the big institutions replacing them with struggling community-based care and underfunded regional mental health services. ▪️Deinstitutionalisation was sorely needed but the neoliberal laissez-faire number-crunchers saw it just as a way to save government costs. ▪️I saw firsthand the effects, good and bad, and was engaged in picking up the pieces of this systematic failure. ▪️So many lives were lost or wasted, families left in misery, ‘clients’ left to twist in the wind, and generations of under-treated cases of mental illness drifting, sometimes screaming, through our communities. ▪️Only when there are murders - as in Bondi Junction - or attacks on prominent individuals - Helen Haines allegedly - does attention fall onto this monstrous ongoing community disaster. 👉 If this is not good enough, we need to pay the costs to fix it. 👉 If the public coffers are bare, then we need to raise taxes. 👉 We need to make the resource companies, banks, wealthy corporations, and the 1% uber rich pay, they can afford it. Whose community is it anyway? — “I absolutely think there is more that the system can do to prevent people that are unwell causing harm.” theage.com.au/national/victo…