Letter to editor: mental illness and education
Letters editor Canberra Times
By email: letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au
Dear Editor
I hesitate to dignify with a response the second-hand article which the Canberra Times retailed yesterday, calling for discrimination in education against people with a mental illness on the basis of presumed dangerousness ("Entrance exams should test a student's mental suitability", 6 September). The article, referring to "bizarre inscriptions" and "gibberish", itself fitted those descriptions very well. I hope the rights to reprint this article did not cost the Canberra Times as much in money as in reputation.
I am responding nonetheless, because it is very important for me to state that the greatest barriers faced by people with mental illnesses are often those caused by thoughtless prejudice and myth making.
For the record, 1 in every 5 Australians experiences a form of mental illness throughout their lives, 95% of whom fully recover. No higher rate or risk of violence or dangerousness has ever been demonstrated among people with a mental illness as a group than among the population in general. Bodies such as the American Psychiatric Association have repeatedly disclaimed any professional ability to predict dangerousness on the basis of illness rather than prior behaviour.
It is all too convenient for less meticulous journalists to refer to a "mad" or "deranged" perpetrator of acts of violence or harassment, rather than look for real causes in, for example, access to weapons in the United States as per the example used, or an inability to accept women, or people with different colour skin or religion, as equals.
Laws such as our federal Disability Discrimination Act give people with psychiatric or other disabilities no more right than anyone else to behave in violent or threatening ways. The law does, rightly, give all people with disabilities a right to freedom from arbitrary and ill informed exclusion such as urged by your article. I do hope in future greater discretion and less offence will be the outcome when staff of the Canberra Times are trying to fill space on a slow news day.
SUSAN HALLIDAY
Federal A/g Disability Discrimination Commissioner
7 September 2000