Gaetan

‘My life's gotten worse as a result of … involuntary psychiatric treatment.’

Gaetan is in his early 40s and lives with paranoid schizophrenia. His ‘schizophrenic illness’ emerged about a decade ago when he was studying medicine.

‘I just had a young family … when I was first admitted,’ he told the Royal Commission. ‘I lost everything that I was doing at the time. I lost my career.’

Since his diagnosis, Gaetan has been in and out of acute mental health units under a compulsory treatment order.

‘More often than not’, it’s the police who take him to hospital and they’re ‘quite reasonable’, he said. ‘But it's … what goes on in the psychiatric wards … that concerns me.’

During involuntary admissions, Gaetan said, nurses have given him medications that resulted in him ‘losing consciousness’.

‘Subsequently losing a day, waking up with bruises on my arm, not being able to explain those bruises.’

He feels mental health workers have mistreated him, particularly with ‘the microdosing’ of drugs without his consent.

‘I've had a number of experiences where I've been very, very concerned that I've been drugged without my knowledge.’

Gaetan has been on ‘seclusion cells’ for treatment.

‘It’s one thing to do something like hypnotise someone, possibly expose them to electroconvulsive therapy … against their consent on the basis of legislation which seems to allow this stuff. But it's another thing to do it without their knowledge altogether … This stuff happens in seclusion.’

Once he was admitted during a schizophrenic episode.

‘I was very paranoid that patients and nurses had been delegated tasks to intimidate me, to torment me. And I got into such a state whereby I was dragged to the HDU, which is … the high dependency unit.’

Gaetan was resisting, so four staff tackled him. One of them ‘looked like he was straight out of the Hell's Angels’.

‘I make no bones about it. I can be difficult in there, because I feel like my rights are being violated, you know … They injected me with something that made me feel like I've never felt before.’

Nurses told Gaetan it was a medication for anxiety. ‘But it wasn’t,’ he said.

‘And it's not the only time it's happened … I just wanted the injection that I was having to be made up in front of me, so I could see.’

Until recently, Gaetan was under the care of the public guardian. His case manager was supposed to find him accommodation for when the hospital discharged him, but ‘made next to no effort whatsoever’.

Once a nurse told him they could ‘discharge someone to homelessness', which he found cruel. But it came to fruition when the case worker ‘dumped’ him with his bags at a caravan park.

‘[Since then] I've been living in pubs, lodges … those types of things.’

About a year ago, Gaetan ‘got off the public guardian’.

‘Because I was doing well … It's just another thing that takes away your self-agency, your self-advocacy. I mean, my life was much harder … I went downhill.’

Today he’s on the NDIS, is working as a volunteer and recently found himself a flat to rent.

‘I'm back in control of things, which I'm grateful for.’

Gaetan wants the ‘behemoths’ of the state mental health system to treat people with mental illness ‘therapeutically’ rather than ‘punitively’.