Dr Michael Dudley
I think that the Four Corners program showed (among other things) how immigration department (DIMIA) and detention centre staff were very slow in responding to Cornelia Rau's distress, despite the signals given from visitors, detainees and Cornelia herself. She was thought to have a severe mental illness, possibly schizophrenia, but prompt psychiatric review and an action plan didn't happen.
She was off medication for months. Accounts from detainees and visitors indicated that guards mocked her, male guards frequently saw her naked, and that they manhandled her with undue force when her behaviour was disturbed. They also incarcerated her in a "Management Unit" (solitary confinement) that could only make her problem worse, because of its isolation, sensory deprivation, and function of controlling and punishing those who don't "behave".
Despite having mental health staff who supposedly treat detainees, Baxter and other immigration detention centres are fundamentally places of custody, and places where abuses of power flourish and people can be dehumanised, because they are run for profit and are not reviewable by the usual processes available in a democratic society. They create the disturbance that they then purport to treat. Regardless of the best intentions of individual staff, DIMIA is an abusive system.
[Dudley is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and a member of the Alliance of Medical Professionals for the Health of Asylum Seekers.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 13, 2005.
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