What is it about?
This article is about the rise in police shootings after the closure of psychiatric institutions in Victoria, Australia. The spike in shootings coincided with major mental health policy changes in line with a broader neoliberal restructuring of economic policy and the welfare state.
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Why is it important?
Police continue to play a key role in people's pathways to mental health services. Distressed, confused, disabled or disordered people often encounter police before any other state service, such as health or social services. Yet police are not always equipped to deal with people in mental health crises. This article explores the dangers of a police force that is not prepared to respond to individuals in profound states of distress.
Perspectives
This piece charts a really important period of transition from the old-style, large-scale 'mental institutions' to the newer policy of dispersed 'care in the community'. The policy change emerged from a complex shift in economic and welfare policy away from the post-war, therapeutic welfare state, in which expert-based paternalism and institutionalisation defined many disabled lives. During the 1980s and 90s, this era shifted toward neoliberal policies of privatising, deregulating and shrinking the public sector. Victoria had the unique situation of a paramilitarised police training regime at this time, partly as a result of a decades-long violent conflict between police and certain citizens. The result appears to be a 'perfect storm' in which people with disabilities were disproportionately encountering police violence.
Dr Piers M Gooding
University of Melbourne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘The government is the cause of the disease and we are stuck with the symptoms’: deinstitutionalisation, mental health advocacy and police shootings in 1990s Victoria, Continuum, February 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1275146.
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