Oz:Mentally ill woman wrongly locked up in detention centre

Yes, Andrew. It really does make you wonder what sort of "care" the detained asylum seekers receive in places like Baxter, too. There must be many of them who are traumatized by their experiences. How hard could it have been to deduce that this woman (whatever her nationality) was seriously ill? So what did they do? Locked her up for 20 hours a day! It's purely a matter of luck that she's not in there, still.

A sample of l;etters from today's AGE newspaper will give you some idea of the outrage being expressed here:


The mental health of detainees is part of our duty of care
February 8, 2005


The Cornelia Rau case raises serious concerns about the quality of mental health care available to detainees.

From its inception in the early 1990s, I have psychiatrically assessed a significant number of asylum seeking detainees at the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre and also provided treatment to many of them after their release when, after months to years, their claims were upheld. We also conducted a study which showed that detention of genuine asylum seekers doubled their rates of mental illness.

Until the late 1990s the management of the centre had an open approach to external specialists providing assessment and treatment and facilitated psychiatric hospitalisation where necessary, and even release into the community where this was judged to be essential for the recovery of a person with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or severe depression.

However, with the setting up of health services under private contract at the centre, the scenario has totally changed. It is now extremely difficult for the considerable proportion of detainees with mental disorders to gain access to independent specialist psychiatric assessment and treatment.

While it is true health professionals are contracted to provide medical care within the detention centres, they are in an invidious situation ethically, and do not appear to have free access to key specialist expertise. I can see detainees as a professional now only for medicolegal reports at a solicitor's request.

As an example of the total subordination of clinical to correctional goals, the response to active suicidal risk and behaviour, typically a feature of serious mental disorder, is protracted solitary confinement and constant direct observation.

This strategy, while it exacerbates the underlying disorder and suffering, aims solely to prevent the death of the detainee. No expert psychiatric assessment, treatment or hospitalisation is provided.

The situation is worse than that in traditional prisons, where at least a forensic psychiatry service is available for serious mental disorder.

Despite the high rates of psychiatric disorder, particularly depression, traumatic stress and psychoses, the Rau case shows that specialist mental health care is clearly inaccessible to detainees.

The effects of detention and failure to treat on Cornelia Rau and her illness should prompt reform in the provision of psychiatric care to all detainees as part of a fundamental duty of care.

I have written to the Minister for Immigration offering my assistance - and I believe other advice and support would be forthcoming in the context of a genuine review.

-Professor Patrick McGorry, department of psychiatry, University of Melbourne,

<More letters - the first 4-5 on this issue>
http://www.theage.com.au/letters/index.html
[size=7][/size]

Hello REELjohnboy.
Grim little story, this, isn't it?

Actually - it raises questions (most of which I sadly know the answer to) about mental health care in the prison system as well as in detention.

If neither system can identify the barking mad - well..... Jonahan Phillips, the psychiatrist in charge of mental health servics here in SA was able to assess enough without seeing the woman to demand an independen assessment - which he had to throw tantrums to achieve. other people outside the deention system were also seriously alarmed - we were detainees.


The other question is, of course, if being in detention has proved so traumatizing to Ms Rau - why the SMEG are we exposing ANYONE - inluding CHILDREN - and already seriously traumatized people - to such a milieu????


Grrrrrrrrr...

Yes. Exactly. <sigh>

Amanda Vanstone (Minister for Immigration) has just announced a private enquiry into this affair. Hmmmmm ... Is there anything left to hide?

Last Update: Tuesday, February 8, 2005. 1:08pm (AEDT)
)

Former police chief to head Rau inquiry
By Political correspondent Samantha Hawley


The Federal Government has announced that former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer will head up a private inquiry into the wrongful detention of a mentally ill Sydney woman.

Despite pressure from Labor and the minor parties for a public judicial inquiry, the Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone announced the inquiry to be headed by Mr Palmer will be held in private.

"There are obvious reasons for that and the first has already been hinted at and that is the concern for Ms Rau's privacy," she said.

"There are a number of matters in relation to Ms Rau that are now considered as fact by the Australian community and they simply aren't."

Cornelia Rau was held behind bars at a Queensland prison and at the Baxter detention centre for a total of 10 months while being listed as a missing person.

Some Coalition MPs expressed their concern with the Government's handling of the issue when they met with the Prime Minister this morning.

The Government will receive a final report on March 24.

In other developments:
High-profile federal government backbencher Malcolm Turnbull says mentally ill woman Cornelia Rau, who was wrongly detained in immigration detention, deserves an apology. (Full Story)
Federal Opposition Leader Kim Beazley says the Government must apologise to the mentally ill woman who was wrongly detained in an immigration detention centre in South Australia. (Full Story)
The wrongful detention of mentally ill Sydney woman Cornelia Rau has led to growing calls for more public scrutiny of what takes place inside the Baxter detention centre in South Australia. (Full Story)
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200502/s1298268.htm

Now there's a cult implicated in this case, too! This poor woman has really been through the mill:

Rau's sister blames cult
By Daniel Ziffer
February 8, 2005 - 12:49PM/the AGE

The mental illness suffered by Cornelia Rau allegedly advanced during her involvement with a Sydney cult.

According to a newspaper report, Ms Rau - who suffers from schizophrenia and was wrongly held as an illegal immigrant in Baxter detention centre - became unwell while a member of a religious cult.

The former Qantas flight attendant spent several months with the group, based in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills, in 1998.

The Kenja Communications group, run by Ken Dyers, claims it is a non-religious organisation.

On its website, the group describes itself as a "personal communication training organisation," which practises "Energy Conversion meditation".

The Sydney head office of Kenja Communications gave only a brief reply when contacted by The Age Online this morning.

"We don't wish to speak to you," a female voice said quickly, adding, "thank you" before hanging up.

According to the newspaper report, the false name Ms Rau used - Anne Schmidt - is a compound of the names of her two Kenja "buddies", Anna Schouten and Caroline Schmidt.

Ms Rau's sister Christine blamed the group for her sister's mental illness.

"It was while she was with them [the cult] that she started getting sick," she said.

"We couldn't figure out how she got so ill."

Ms Rau went missing in March last year after she checked herself out of a psychiatric clinic in Manly, Sydney.

At the time, her sister contacted Kenja to seek information. She claims that they would not answer her questions.

"They seemed very secretive, they wouldn't talk to me," she was reported as saying.

The 83-year-old founder and leader of Kenja, Ken Dyers, has not commented on the allegations.

He was convicted in 1999 over charges he sexually abused girls as young as 11, but was cleared after a High Court appeal in 2002.

He claimed that the charges arose when he was framed by former members.

A former Kenja member contacted by the newspaper said he knew Cornelia, and witnessed her decline.

"She went a bit funny at the time she was in there," he said.

On its website, Kenja claims it is a "non-political personal communication training organisation, designed to help the individual achieve his/her goals and discover his/her purpose".

It has offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.

Getting involved with the cult might have aggravated Ms. Rau's condition but it's hardly likely that it could have caused the onset of schitzophrenia. More likely it was this pre-existing condition which caused her to get involved with a cult in the first place.

Psychiatrists failed to diagnose Rau's schizophrenia
Greg Roberts and Elizabeth Colman
February 09, 2005/the Australian

AN inquiry will be held into the Cornelia Rau detention case as it emerged an intensive six-day assessment by psychiatrists declared her sane despite her being off schizophrenia medication for more than five months.

Former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer will investigate how the 39-year-old Australian came to be held in solitary confinement at Baxter Detention Centre and why she did not receive treatment despite suffering schizophrenia.

But the six-week investigation will be held behind closed doors against the wishes of Ms Rau's family, which had called for an open judicial inquiry.

Ms Rau's sister, Christine Rau, revealed yesterday that Cornelia was involved in a romantic triangle which may have contributed to her mental decline.

"The things I do know, I don't want to go into, because they could be defamatory ... some involved a romantic triangle, so it (her mental problems) could have been thwarted romance on her part," she said.

She said a woman called Allison was involved in her sister's romantic problems, which occurred while she was part of a Sydney cult known as Kenja Communications.

She also questioned how the six-day psychiatric assessment at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital could have failed to detect her sister's psychosis.

"After that period of time, without the medication she was on for schizophrenia, her behaviour would have been immediately apparent."

Ms Rau's examination when she was a patient at the Princess Alexandra mental health unit last August has emerged as an important part of the puzzle surrounding her detention. A hospital spokeswoman said psychiatric assessments concluded Ms Rau did not require care in an acute mental health facility.

From the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Ms Rau was returned to the Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre, where she had been incarcerated four months earlier after being apprehended by police in far-north Queensland.

Two months later she was transferred to the Baxter Detention Centre in South Australia, where she was detained until her family identified her last week. But Christine Rau said her sister had been receiving injections to treat schizophrenia. These stopped when she discharged herself from Manly Hospital in Sydney last March.

"She was in a psychotic state in hospital, so by the time she was picked up by the Queensland police after the medication stopped, her behavioural problems should have been obvious," she said.

And now - smear the fok who are giving Vanstone the bad news???

"Researchers accuse Govt of smear campaign

By Margot O'Neill for Lateline

Some of Australia's most senior medical researchers have accused the Federal Government of backing a campaign to discredit their studies showing the extent of mental illness in detention centres.

They say they are being harassed and vilified and that their work has been deliberately undermined.

Their accusations come after a series of embarrassing revelations for the Government in the case of mentally ill Australian woman Cornelia Rau.

The Rau case has focused the nation's attention on the treatment of the mentally ill in Australia's detention centres.

Child trauma expert Louise Newman, a senior representative of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry and director of the New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry, is one of a group of medical research experts who are regularly quoted in scientific journals and the international media about the mental health effects of long-term detention.

"There is a growing body of evidence that essentially all points to the psychological harm of prolonged detention and I think that's beyond question," Dr Newman said.

Dr Newman and her colleagues claim that a little-known psychiatrist with no research experience is on a Government-funded mission to discredit their research.
Harassment and vilification

"I see this as nothing more than a campaign of harassment and personal vilification," Dr Newman said.

"What I'm most concerned about is that this is seemingly sponsored by the Department of Immigration, if not the Minister, who should ultimately be responsible for this."

Fellow researcher Zachary Steel, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, said: "It soon became quite clear that this was a concerted campaign, not at a scientific level, but actually to discredit and destroy our academic careers."

Dr Newman is convinced it is a Government-backed campaign because in the middle of last year, during a meeting with the Minister, Amanda Vanstone, and her advisers, she was told their research was about to be attacked.

"At a meeting that I had in June of 2004 with Senator Vanstone and John Nation and Andrew Kirk, her principal advisers, to discuss the issues of children in detention, I was informed that there would be a discrediting of the research that I had also been involved in," she said.

"They said 'watch this space, Zachary Steel and your research is going to be discredited'."

The man at the centre of the storm is Doron Samuell, a Sydney psychiatrist who runs a medical legal consulting business and whose major clients include insurance companies.
Advocacy, not science

Despite having no background in research or with detention centres, he says he approached the Government after he heard psychiatrists behaving more like advocates than scientists in media interviews.

"I see the research that they undertook as being an effort at advocacy rather than at science," Dr Samuell said.

Dr Samuell says he was paid by the Immigration Department for just one report, in which he concluded the research on detention centres was fatally flawed and dishonest.

In particular, he says the researchers used refugee activists to set up interviews, that their clinical assessments were designed to help get people out of detention, and that it was not an appropriate basis for unbiased research.

"I am very concerned about objectivity and bias in the research. In this research, they offered explicit advantage to those who participated in the research, and that corrupted the research itself," he said.

The researchers say they clearly spelt out the limitations of their studies, which arose mainly because of government restrictions to their access to detainees.

"The department has never commissioned its own inquiry," Mr Steele said. "Instead they're putting all their money into people to try to discredit this research."
Reputations tarnished

Dr Newman says she and her colleagues have had their reputations tarnished by Dr Samuell, who has lodged formal complaints with various academic and professional institutions and magazines.

In one email, Dr Samuell attacks University of New South Wales professor Derrick Silove, an international expert on refugees and trauma.

Dr Samuell tells Sweden's prestigious Karolinska Institute, where Professor Silove is a guest lecturer, that Professor Silove has "engaged in dishonest research and that this may reflect poorly on your institution".

"If there was a genuine and open, transparent attempt to undertake a proper evaluation of the mental health and general health in relation to detention centres, the appropriate body for that is the National Health and Medical Research Council," Professor Silove said from Dili in East Timor.

Dr Samuell says he has never discussed any kind of campaign with the Government in any of his meetings with the Minister's senior advisers, whom he met as recently as December.

"As you see from the research and from the nature of these questions, this is a very complex medical area and it's important for me to explain my findings," he said.

Dr Samuell says the issue is not personal but about science.

"Ironically, had their research been robust and ethically sound, they would have a chance of being much more persuasive to myself and to my colleagues, and would have been more likely that it would have had an impact on government policies earlier," he said.

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone's office has been contacted but so far has not commented on the issue.

A spokesman for the Immigration Department said it had no plans to commission any further research from Dr Samuell.
In other developments:
Former Victorian premier and mental health advocate Jeff Kennett has joined calls for a public judicial inquiry into the wrongful detention of an Australian citizen. (Full Story)
A prisoner support group has attacked the Queensland Government for releasing the transcript of a prison interview with wrongfully detained woman Cornelia Rau. (Full Story)
There are calls for an inquiry into the mistaken detention of Sydney woman Cornelia Rau to extend to the treatment of all detainees in South Australia's Baxter detention centre. (Full Story)
The Queensland Government has made public an interview given in a Brisbane jail last year by mentally ill woman Cornelia Rau, in which she gives a false name and claims she is an illegal immigrant from Germany. (Full Story)"



Newman is a highly respected figure in my field (Infant mental health and trauma) - how interesting this latest stuff is......Newman is highly experienced as an expert witness - Vanstone married into a prominent Adelaide legal family - Newman is considering suing - go Louise!!!!!!)

Protesters demand open Rau inquiry
February 12, 2005 - 5:11PM/the AGE


Several hundred protesters gathered outside the Adelaide office of Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone today, demanding a full public inquiry into the Cornelia Rau affair.

The federal government this week announced former Australian Federal Police chief Mick Palmer would conduct a private inquiry into the mix-up that placed the 39-year-old German-born Australian in immigration detention for 10 months.

But Labor, the Greens, the Democrats, refugee advocates and Ms Rau's family have all called for an independent and public judicial inquiry.

Labor and the Democrats also want a Senate inquiry into the matter, while mental health authorities say the Rau case highlights Australia's failing mental health system.

South Australian Greens MP Kris Hanna today vowed to establish what he termed a people's inquiry into the case, should the calls for a Senate inquiry be rejected.

Mr Hanna said the Greens already had professionals willing to conduct an inquiry into what goes on inside the Baxter Detention Centre.

"We would have several professionals of high standing able to lodge (Freedom of Information) requests to get official documents and interview detainees who actually saw Cornelia in Baxter," Mr Hanna told ABC radio. "So that way, I think, we've got a better chance of getting at the truth than the minister's whitewash investigation."- AAP

Costello apologises to Cornelia Rau
February 13, 2005 - 11:03AM/the Sunday AGE


Treasurer Peter Costello today said sorry to wrongly detained Australian resident Cornelia Rau.

He admitted the system had failed the mentally ill woman who was held in detention by immigration for ten months.

It was important to ensure no similar mistake happened again in future, Mr Costello said.

German-born Ms Rau, 39, is being treated in an Adelaide psychiatric unit for schizophrenia after being released from South Australia's Baxter immigration detention centre less than two weeks ago.

Ms Rau who has lived in Australia since she was a child spent six months in a Queensland jail after being found in north Queensland. She was sent to Baxter in October, where she was held for a further four months. "I am sorry that it happened. I think the government is sorry that it happened," Mr Costello told Channel Seven.

"The important thing is to find out who is responsible."

He said no one of goodwill would be pleased with the way Ms Rau was treated and that she was let down by the system.

"The system failed Cornelia Rau and it's regrettable," Mr Costello said.

"I'm sure all those that are responsible will say to themselves it should never have happened and we should never let it happened again."

- AAP

Will he push for an open inquiry, then?

If my surprise at the above post seems odd, it's because our prime minister (John Howard) is famous for NEVER EVER saying sorry to anyone! And believe me, there are many who have warranted a public apology.



This apology to Ms Rau has come from his treasurer, who reckons it's way past his turn at being PM. Division in the ranks?

So - some poor bastards will take the fall for two disgusting - and disgustingly underfunded - systems - corrections and detentions.

I have no reason to think Brisbane's psychiatrists are unable to detect mental illness under normal circumstances - so I can only imagine that Ms Rau was able to keep up some kind of front for the six days - also, that she would have to have been detainable under the Mental health Act to be able to stay in hospital. That is a heavy burden of proof. Especially if you have a smart person contesting it.

What is more concerning to me is Vanstone's attack on the likes of Louise Newman. I have been googling her attack dog - and he turns up a lot on the right. He bitterly contested the BMA's attempt tp censor the Israeli Medical Association for complicity in mistreatment and torture of Palestinian prisoners.

My puter is so slow that I haven't yet been able to look at any papers of his - or to look at the research done by Newman et al - but I will be interested to do so. Trouble is, they are likely to be in scholarly journals which you have to pay for.

However, I have reason to know about the mental health status of detainees - though I cannot, of course, say anything more. Vanstone will wanna have some damn fine evidence if she is gonna slag the likes of Newman. I hope she gets her pants sued off.

If she said it in Parliament it's priviliged. Which is about as brave a reply as we'll be seeing from Amanda. Deny, obfusticate, blame the messenger and quibble of the meanings of words - that's the only way our 'leaders' know how to deal with a crisis.

Oh - I don't think she said it in parliament.

She hired this fella to discredit the work.

We shall see if he has to any effect.

Couldn't have said it better.....

How low & how gutless of Vanstone! At least she could personally front the press with these "findings", rather than using this questionable expert to do her dirty work!