Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, December 11, 2002


MARGARET TOBIN IS SADLY MISSED


THE year went badly awry again, one dreadful thing after another, but the October killing of Margaret Tobin in her office on Hindmarsh Square was the one that knocked me around a fair bit. Margaret, the head of Mental Health Services, was shot in the back as she returned from lunch. Someone has been charged with her murder, so we shall see. She had addressed a staff meeting of Messenger journalists a year or so earlier. She was forthright and funny, alight with compassion for reforming an ailing system. Afterwards, we went to lunch with a few senior editors and over a glass of wine she was again funny and forthright - off the record, of course - about certain politicians. She was an easy woman to like. She also possessed special powers of persuasion. At her urging, we did a series of articles on hostel care in the western suburbs, and the paper editor concerned even attended a conference in Canberra for ``beyondblue'', the national strategy on preventing and treating depression. The editor, a Laborite, found himself seated next to the beyondblue chairman, former Victorian Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, which he thought would be very depressing indeed. In fact, said our man afterwards, Kennett was not really a boofhead but a quiet, reserved bloke. Hmm, it's possible, I suppose. Also at lunch, I remember we discussed with Margaret whether or not manic depression should be called bipolar disorder. I had a couple of friends with the illness who still insisted on calling it manic depression because the term best described what they felt, ranging from elated euphoria to the black dog of suicidal depression. They could call it whatever they liked, said Margaret, it was their illness. But we mostly talked about how the parklands and the streets had been turned into open-air psychiatric wards. She agreed the policy of freeing people with mental illness from such institutions as Glenside Hospital into the open community had gone too far. What was a well-intentioned attempt to safeguard the human rights of patients had proved itself to be a seriously misguided lunacy. For some, their freedom was a freedom to come to harm. Too sick to recognise their own need for care, their health suffered; no longer compelled to take their medication, they didn't. A mental health system was useless to a patient who was unlikely to use it. Some of them lived in hostels until their problems became too difficult to manage. Frightened and fragile, they took to the streets, lived in squalid squats, with a cardbox box or a bus shelter for a bed. Their plight only raised official interest if they came to harm or broke the law. The typical response was to take them into police custody. Was such an unwell person really better off in a prison than in a treatment program? No, she said. This was Margaret Tobin's battleground. Did she make things better? I expect so but I would like to have quizzed her again over another bottle of wine. She is my Person of the Year.